Audiobook · read by volunteers
Washington Square
Henry James (1843–1916)
Read by Dawn · 35 chapters · 7 h 45
About the book
Catherine Sloper is a plain, shy and affectionate young woman living in a handsome house on Washington Square in New York. Her father, a clever and sharp-tongued doctor, finds her a disappointment and says so with great politeness. When a charming and attentive suitor, Morris Townsend, appears, Catherine's life seems about to change, but her father is convinced that the young man is after her money. Henry James turns this slender situation into a quietly devastating study of love, authority and self-knowledge. With its mixture of irony, tenderness and psychological precision, the novel is among his most readable and most moving. It is short, elegant, and far more painful than its mild surface suggests, a story in which every polite sentence hides something sharper.
Introduction
Henry James (1843-1916) published Washington Square in 1880, first as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine in England and in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in America, and then as a book. It is a short novel by his standards, and structurally simple: a handful of principal characters, a single setting, and a story of conflict between a father and a daughter over a suitor.
The setting is the New York of the middle of the nineteenth century, a society James knew from his own childhood, and he evokes it with affection and a clear eye. Washington Square was a fashionable and rather dignified neighbourhood, and the house at its centre is as much a character as the people who live in it. The book is described as a tragicomedy, and the mix is exact: the drily comic surface gives way gradually to something deeply sad.
James himself later spoke of the work with some reserve, and for a time it was overshadowed by his longer novels. Over the years, however, readers have come to value its economy and its portrait of a heroine who is easy to underestimate. It has been adapted for the stage and for the cinema.
This LibriVox recording has thirty-five chapters, lasts nearly eight hours, and is read by a volunteer. It is a fine place to begin with Henry James. It is a book about the way families can wound each other with the best of intentions, and about the quiet resilience of a person whom others have misjudged. Its brevity makes it one of the easiest of his novels to approach, and one of the most rewarding.
Public domain
Henry James died in 1916: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text