Henry James is a heuristic writer. Know what I mean?In other words, he remained throughout his life a Seeker. The overarching priority of Being over Becoming meant little to him, as a truth he could hold on to. So, impelled by his own tumultuous and impetuous cravings - the cravings that comprised his inner Daemon - he was driven “down, down - to a sunless sea:” the world of deep and dangerous introspection...Tonight, after re-dipping deeply into Henry James’ convoluted introspections in this no...

*A wise old child lived among strange folkThe more she saw, the less she spoke,The less she spoke, the more she cried,What's to become of that wise old child?**Maisie, Maisie, sharp yet hazy,How does your garden grow?With jam suppers and boiled beef,And pretty ladies all in a row.***There was a fine lady who had a girl child. She had so many lovers, she didn't hear when she cried. She gave her some broth without any bread, Then whipped her right soundly and sent her to bed.****Hush-a-bye Maisie,...

Well, I told myself to review more of my 5 star books instead of taking the easy way out projectile sneering at some grisly two star efforts. but it's hard. There are some brilliant Henry James reviews dotted around, and this won't be one of those. I think there's a point in some of these long, long literary careers (it's true of long musical careers too) where you've followed the writer out of the early period into the majestic middle period and you know the late period is going to give you a m...

Book Circle Reads 43Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: What Maisie Knew (1897) represents one of James's finest reflections on the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge, and the question of their finality. The child of violently divorced parents, Maisie Farange opens her eyes on a distinctly modern world. Mothers and fathers keep changing their partners and names, while she herself becomes the pretext for all sorts of adult sexual intrigue. In this classic tale of the death of childhoo...

How to describe this book; different, unusual, even disturbing on some level. Young Maisie Farange has, possibly, the two worst parents in the history of literature, Dickens characters notwithstanding. Her two step parents, from opposite sides of the parental marriages, were somewhat better, but still lacking from my point of view. Her governess, Mrs. Wix, was the most responsible adult in the book, certainly the best one to have custody of Maisie. I would like to read about Maisie as an adult,

Years ago, I read somewhere, perhaps in Graves' Goodbye to All of That, or a biography on Ford Madox Ford, where it was recorded (a tricky word if it's Graves) that Ford, while out in the trenches, read and greatly admired Henry James' What Maisie Knew. What stuck in my mind was the fact that Ford (as I remember it) thought it a great treatment of evil and children. Ford, a quirky but fine critic, could be a critical bear when it came to James, so the fact that he singled this novel out for prai...

When I saw that this book was about a young girl whose parents divorce and both remarry, and how she is shuttled between the various adults that have some reponsibility for her, I wondered why it wasn't in the Ultimate Teen Book Guide in place of 'Daisy Miller'. But the reason for that became clear as soon as I started reading it. The language is very difficult, with sentences that go on for line after line without ever arriving at an obvious meaning. I was often getting to the end of a paragrap...

What Maisie Knew is the story of the breakup of an English couple, seen through the eyes of their little girl, Maisie, who is the victim.The starting point is a divorce, as a child, a remarriage. The reader knows of events only what Maisie perceives, but with our adult interpretation, we know more things since we can interpret the signs observed by Maisie.Maisie reflects with serenity the adventures of parents and in-laws. According to Andre Gide, Henry James is a "virtuose"; this novel is "a te...

My real life reading friends and I - a scant five of us - have, at my suggestion, and since 2014, attempted an annual group reading project (book, theme or author). That first year was Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. In 2015, we pledged to read novels about WWI by authors from the participant countries. Last year was Anthony Trollope. For reasons you could guess as easily as I can, one of the five of us (not me), at the end of each year, has not read any book in the project. The rest of us have a...

Spiralling into an end-of-summer reading and viewing slump, where my otherwise robust capacity for studied appreciation snaps into tethersnapping irritation. This novel abandonment preceded a narked abandonment of Bèla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, one of those tedious, lugubrious, Romanian black and white arthouse films that make people hate arthouse films, and cineastes consider life-changing masterpieces kissed by Yahweh. It seems that others found What Maisie Knew as unappealing as me, with...

I hate Henry James with an eternal and fiery passion. I rarely hate a book utterly; I hate this book. It's actually worse than The Bostonians, which I would not have imagined possible. It's just not necessary to write sentences two hundred words long with four semicolons and eight commas. It's just not. Especially not EVERY sentence.It's like reading an impossibly uninteresting Jane Austen novel that's been babelfished into German and then back. I could only read it for ten minutes at a time, be...

What Maisie Knew is an exquisite, highly polished artifact, in a way that reminded me of The Spoils of Poynton, another of my favourite James novels. I was interested to see, after finishing the novel, that these two works were published back-to-back in 1897. Both feature tortuous, even brutal, family relationships—the stuff of tabloids—transmuted into beauty through James’s ethereal, allusive style. In the case of Maisie, the novel’s chief subject is the havoc wreaked on children by acrimonious...

In the annals of classic fiction I have encountered some truly monstrous parents (some of the parents in Austen or Dickens certainly come to mind), but the mother and father of little Maisie Farange must surely be the worst. They are truly beyond despicable, and if I could reach into the pages of Henry James's What Maisie Knew, I'd throttle them both! Okay, now that I've gotten that off of my chest, perhaps I can provide an objective review of this novel. What Maisie Knew was written by Henry Ja...

I was angry while reading this book. Children forced to act as adults, because the adults in their lives act like children. Maisie learned at an early age how to survive divorce. Her parents stole her childhood from her, by making her a pawn in their disputes. Then they chose other people to influence Maisie who were just as bad. I liked the book, but had to get used to the dialogue of the times. Good book to read abôut how not to handle a divorce with children involved.

After finishing this book, I recognize, in retrospect, that it's a thorough and insightful look at the psyche of a young girl, fought over by her divorced parents and, ultimately, her step-parents, yet while I was still in the process of reading it, I could hardly stand to keep turning the pages, perhaps due, in part, to the sheer number of phrases and, by extension, commas that Henry James packed into every sentence. (See what I did there?)

What Maisie Knew could be said to be about a great deal of things. Better known today by its contemporary adaptation set in New York City (a really excellent movie), the original Henry James book follows the life of a precocious but confused little girl used as a pawn by both of her hedonistic, selfish parents. Having recently separated in a messy and bitter divorce, Beale and Ida Farange care little for their daughter Maisie beyond that she can be used as a tool to hurt and spite one another. W...

Thought I was over a mild obsession with Henry James, but not so much. Having bumped into the Toronto Film Festival and a movie adaptation of What Maisie Knew, I got the book. And was transported back to college and my infatuation with James and his marvelous voyeuristic peerings into emotional (sexual) repression. Freud was obsessed with it. James as well. I thought Turn of the Screw was the best example before today. Oh blimey, that marvelous scene when The Governess first conjures Peter Quint...

I read The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady sometime in the early ‘90s, when I was in graduate school. They passed through my consciousness with nary a ripple; the impression that I carried away was…boredom. I wasn’t able to engage with any of the characters, and the elite social milieu of late Victorian/Edwardian England wasn’t of interest to me as such (give me a W. Somerset Maugham tale and it’s a different story). Recently, and after much mental to-ing and fro-ing, I picked up an audio...

Try as I might, I just couldn't get into what I thought was going to be right up my alley. I blame that partly on circumstances -- I do much of my reading on the subway, and you just can't read James like that: a short trip alone will get you through a mere paragraph which you'll have gone over three or four times trying to even comprehend. So yes, I'll give James another chance when I can read him under more favorable conditions, but I also find his style needlessly cumbersome and obscure rathe...

James has a knack both for creating monsters and weaklings. This book seemed to contain nothing but, and depending on how you look at them, each its possible to see each character as being a bit of both. On the surface, it all drives towards a big moral choice for Masie. But I keep thinking that the choice is ultimately false. There's so much baseness underlying each of her options, that it was hard for me to see it as a moral choice at all. Did she do the right thing? Did she even end up with t...