Washington Square (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

JAMES, Henry (intro. Louis Auchincloss; illus. Lawrence Beall Smith). Washington Square. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1971.

Octavo. Full light blue leather. Spine with three raised bands, gilt-decorated. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 204 pp. Illustrations by Lawrence Beall Smith throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Masterpieces of American Literature series. An early and scarce Easton Press production.

Washington Square was published in 1880, the year before The Portrait of a Lady, and stands in instructive contrast to that novel. Where The Portrait of a Lady unfolds across England, Florence, and Rome, with a cast drawn from the international society that James knew intimately, Washington Square is set entirely in a single New York neighbourhood — the quiet, respectable, brownstone world of lower Fifth Avenue in the 1840s and 1850s — and its four characters are as plainly drawn as any James ever created. It is, by some distance, his most accessible novel, and also, in its ending, one of his most quietly devastating.

Catherine Sloper is the only child of Dr. Austin Sloper, a brilliant, prosperous New York physician who cannot forgive his daughter for being neither beautiful nor clever, and who watches her romantic life with the detached amusement of a man whose intellectual superiority has immunised him against feeling. When Morris Townsend — handsome, charming, and conspicuously without occupation — begins to court Catherine, Dr. Sloper identifies him immediately as a fortune-hunter. He is correct. The question the novel poses is what that correctness costs him, and what it costs Catherine. Morris eventually abandons her when it becomes clear that Dr. Sloper will disinherit her if she marries him. Years pass. Catherine lives quietly in Washington Square, sewing, as her father always thought she would. When Morris returns, older and humbled, hoping to resume where they left off, Catherine's response to him is the final turn of a novel that has been, from the first page, a study in the varieties of human cruelty.

The novel was adapted for the stage as The Heiress in 1947 by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, and filmed the same year with Olivia de Havilland in the title role and Ralph Richardson as Dr. Sloper. The stage version remains in the repertoire. The introduction to this edition was written by Louis Auchincloss (1917–2010), the American novelist and literary critic whose own fiction about New York society placed him in direct descent from James, and who wrote some of the most perceptive critical commentary on James's work produced in the twentieth century.

The Easton Press edition of 1971, part of the early Masterpieces of American Literature series, is among the first productions of the Easton Press programme and is considerably scarcer than the later "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" Collector's Editions.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000481