I read this little novella because Deleuze and Guattari use it as an exemplary novella in a chapter of A Thousand Plateaux; they have good theories about James, and you could probably interpret this book very fully with it, namely with the elusive concept of 'the secret' as the central element of th

A rueful, gently comic novella -- neglected because scholars couldn't explain its 'misfit' in the James canon. Its focus is the working-class whose lives are a grind for God & Country. In pre-telephone days, c. 1900, a likeable telegraphist, engaged to a grocer, becomes involved in the coded "messag

how does he know so well what it's like to have a shitty job?

A menudo, los libros de Henry James son como una partida de póker. Es decir, una reunión de personajes sentados alrededor de una mesa, observándose mutuamente mientras guardan silencio y preparan su jugada. Por un momento no ocurre nada; sin embargo, en la mente de esos jugadores ocurre todo. En sus

Only James could take an unnamed girl working in a telegraph office and turn her in to one of the most complex characters I've even studied.

Sometimes I get the sense that Henry James hates women and woefully misreads them. Other times I get the sense that Henry James understood women on a more desperate level, at least for the times. This little novella straddles the two.