This novel is unique among James's fiction in having a major character who appeared in an earlier work: Christina Light, the mademoiselle fatale of Roderick Hudson
(1875), was married off by her mother at the end of that novel to the
Italian Prince Casamassima. Now, in a novel bearing her name as its
title, we discover her some ten years or so later, estranged from the
Prince, living in London and taking an interest in the condition of the
destitute poor. However, despite her brightness as 'perhaps the most
remarkable women in Europe' and her name on the title page, the book
actually has as its truly central character a hero, or anti-hero,
Hyacinth Robinson. Like Christina, Hyacinth seems to have a troubled
relationship with the idea of 'aristocracy'; a relationship which may
ultimately prove fatal.
It wasn't originally my intention to spend time producing an electronic edition of The Princess Casamassima,
which is one of the longest of Henry James's novels and which didn't
make an immediate impression when I first read it some fifteen years
ago. However, no one else seemed to be taking on the challenge and,
until the recent disappearance of the etext of The outcry
(1911, adapted from a play), it was the only novel by James not
available on the web, so, when a copy of the first edition came on the
market at a reasonable price (it was not in its original
binding!), I paid up and started work. And I'm very pleased that I did,
since in working carefully through the text twice and following up the
many factual references in the text (to provide the requisite notes in
my edition), I've come to appreciate the many subtleties in James's
treatment of themes in his 'social realist' novel. Working partly in
the tradition of Dickens but more in the French one of Balzac and Zola,
although within constraints imposed by English prudery of course, James
has dissected not so much the revolutionaries based in London in the
early 1880s but that tension between economic and ęsthetic approaches
to life, which is still, or perhaps even more, in play today.
Download
