Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2002), Paperback, 208 pages
Description
Classic Literature. Fiction. Humor (Fiction.) HTML: Henry James' final novel, The Outcry is a light comedy that will come as a pleasant surprise to readers who associate the author's name with the dense, philosophically inclined fiction of his middle period. Originally written for the stage, the story focuses on one British family's attempt to get out of debt by selling a treasure trove of historically significant artworks to foreign collectors..
Media reviews
The New Yorker
In its high-spoken mood of romp and rampant intellectuality, not to say the feminism forthrightly embodied by its conquering heroines, The Outcry resembles a play by Shaw.... The cumbersome though finely painted charabanc of the late James style is pulled swaying along by a frisky pony of a plot,
Show More
farcical and romantic, designed for stage-lit action. This most expatiatory and archly loquacious of novelists is obliged to hold the reins tight. The patter of his incongruous verbal felicities is invigorating; the style itself participates in the comedy. We feel on our faces--we, the readers and the sixty-seven-year-old author--the breeze of the senile sublime, a creativity liberated from its usual, anxiety-producing ambitions. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member michaelm42071
Henry James’s The Outcry, originally produced as a play in It’s very obvious that it’s a play, and in fact what’s not so good about it is James’s “stage directions” about how something was said or how this or that character looked, all in what I take to be his late style, which is
Show More
precious and overworked, with lots of elegant repetitions with variations, alliteration, and other effects. Describing the rich American art collector, Breckenridge Bender, James says, “Substantial, powerful, easy, he shone as with a glorious cleanness, a supplied and equipped and appointed sanity and security; aids to action that might have figured a pair of very ample wings—wide pinions for the present conveniently folded, but that he would ceratinly on occasion agitate for great efforts and spread for great flights” (20). This seems to me both mannered and fantastic: an absurd image described in euphuistic prose. Lady Grace, the younger daughter in Lord Theign’s house (Dedborough—is James thinking of the house at Hampstead heath—what’s its name?) listening worshipfully to the young art critic/connoisseur Hugh Crimble: “This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw” (36). On the other hand, James treats all those questions about the ownership or stewardship of art that he raises elsewhere, and here he does it in a comedy, a romantic comedy, no less, with two couples. And he’s good on the ambiguities of keeping “national treasures” in England, (when most were originally ravaged, one way or another, from other countries) and the cash nexus between connoisseurship and art dealing, a topic very timely I think just as Berenson is beginning to make his mark. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1911
Physical description
208 p.; 8.08 inches
ISBN
1590170008 / 9781590170007