In the Cage (Hesperus Classics) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

In the Cage (Hesperus Classics) Book

Henry James's 1898 novella In the Cage (written in the same year as the more well-known The Turn of the Screw) is a sly, slight, vaguely sentimental work but one that acts as a fine introduction to this most convoluted of writers. Exact ("exacting" yet with a pointillist's precision) is the word most often used to describe James's prose but very often the modern reader will find his hesitant, pedantic, clause-heavy sentences difficult to follow, overlong and tortuously complex. But the key to reading and enjoying James is in succumbing to those very sentences, allowing his perfect ear and fine metre to establish its own rhythm, letting it guide one's response to his beautiful, matchless use of language. In the Cage tells the story of a young women, the "betrothed of Mr Mudge", who works at a post-office counter sending telegrams mostly from the "idle rich" to their fellows to arrange their meetings, parties and other affairs. Concerned, as ever, with the plight of the not so well-to-do--and particularly the role and circumstances of women--James finely delineates our heroine's increasing preoccupation with Captain Everard for whom she sends a considerable number of messages and about whom she has increasingly warm thoughts: "people of her sort... didn't count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly as what". Caught between the modern (this is a tale of communications as well as of communication) and the Victorian (this is a tale of manners and repression; class and its debilitating strictures) In the Cage may well be James-lite but it is not any the less charming, compelling, wry and intelligent for that; and this ultimately very amusing book is a wonderful gift for the right kind of reader. --Mark ThwaiteRead More

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  • Amazon

    This tale of unrequited love, 'In the Cage', is a miniature masterpiece depicting - as in the great novels of Henry James - a moral consciousness torn between emotional impulses and the demands of society.

  • Blackwell

    A young girl working in a Mayfair post office is privy to the brief yet substantial messages telegraphed by wealthy, fashionable people to their similar friends. As she reads, she develops her own particular intimacy with various scandals, amours...

  • Pickabook

    Henry James, Libby Purves (Foreword)

  • 184391025X
  • 9781843910251
  • Henry James, Libby Purves (foreword)
  • 29 November 2002
  • Hesperus Press Ltd
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 128
  • First single volume edition
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