The Jolly Corner
By Henry James
()
About this ebook
Henry James
Henry James (1843–1916) was an American writer, highly regarded as one of the key proponents of literary realism, as well as for his contributions to literary criticism. His writing centres on the clash and overlap between Europe and America, and The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as his most notable work.
Read more from Henry James
The Bostonians Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Europeans Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gothic Novel Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Roderick Hudson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry James: The Complete Novellas and Tales (Centaur Classics) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Turn of the Screw Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Feminist Masterpieces you have to read before you die (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Golden Bowl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The American Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Oxford Book of American Essays Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Gothic Classics: 60+ Books in One Volume Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings30 Occult & Supernatural masterpieces you have to read before you die (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Beast in the Jungle Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Badass Prepper's Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Prepare Yourself for the Worst Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Bushcraft Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Survival Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Greatest American Short Stories: 50+ Classics of American Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Turn of the Screw and Other Short Works Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wings of the Dove Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Italian Hours: “The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.” Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harvard Classics: All 71 Volumes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Greatest American Short Stories (Vol. 1) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Masterpieces of Occult & Supernatural Fiction Vol. 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Jolly Corner
Related ebooks
The Jolly Corner Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories written by a British American – Volume XIV Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ivory Tower Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wings of the Dove: Volume I Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Beast in the Jungle Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wings of the Dove Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wings of the Dove: Volume II Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last Essays of Elia (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dark Hollow Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Eternal Husband Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wings of the Dove: Must Read Classics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Turn of the Screw & Other Novels - 4 Books in One Edition: Including What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove & The Ambassadors Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Beast in the Jungle. The Figure in the Carpet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Beast in the Jungle (Serapis Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mystery Classics of Henry James: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, What Maisie Knew & The Turn of the Screw Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Permanent Husband Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wings of the Dove + The Ambassadors + What Maisie Knew + The Turn of the Screw: (4 Unabridged Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ivory Tower (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/57 best short stories by Henry James Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNona Vincent Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories written by a British American – Volume II Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Bench of Desolation (1909) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDark Hollow Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Beast in the Jungle (1903) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wings of the Dove (Complete Edition): Classic Romance Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gateless Barrier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wings of the Dove Vol - 1&2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarked "Personal" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Titus Groan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Jolly Corner
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Jolly Corner - Henry James
THE JOLLY CORNER
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,
said Spencer Brydon; and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,
he went on, for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.
He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York—he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the swagger
things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his property,
which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so good
—the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an