The highest drama in the book comes from characters turning up unexpectedly in one another’s parlors, speaking in dense, portentous turns of phrase. The Princess Casamassima, first published in The Atlantic in 1885, is a strange novel that follows an oddly named bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, through encounters with both aristocratic and revolutionary circles in late-19th-century London. Yet it remains startlingly modern, and offers a lesson for our politically chaotic times. The Princess Casamassima is largely forgotten it isn’t one of the books that scholars use to prove James’s genius. But even James has had some of his stories lost to time. Between the taut psychology of The Portrait of a Lady, the dizzying world of What Maisie Knew, and the nuance of The Ambassadors, James has retained both his status as one of America’s greatest writers and his perennial place on college syllabi. James died more than a century ago, in 1916, but his reputation has come through the 20th century nearly unscathed. Conrad once described James’s writerly talent as a “magic spring” flowing “without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course.” James was a writer’s writer, the kind who attracted the adulation of his peers. In correspondence with other writers over the years, Joseph Conrad often referred to Henry James as “The Master.” He would not be the only writer to do so.
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