Customer Reviews

The Patagonia Henry James

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This novella has an interesting history; James was quite interested in Trollope, who had published a novella a few years earlier called "The Panama". In it, a young woman embarks on a long sea voyage to meet and marry her fiance after a long engagement. James apparently did not approve of the deux ex machina ending that Trollope used to resolve her difficulties, and wrote his own version, in which the characters take their fate into their own hands.

I read this novella aloud to my wife, and we were both struck by how well James described Boston and the trans-Atlantic crossing on the Patagonia. The settings were beautifully described, and several of the characters were well drawn and very realistic. In many respects, it seemed like a "stripped down" version of "Daisy Miller". The depths of character analysis in both novellas is very compelling.

We were particularly impressed with how quickly a human society formed on the ship, and how powerful that society acted on many of the characters. In part, it seemed, the ship itself imparted its own nature on the passengers (something we've noticed on our own cruises); this ship was protecting but also quite aloof, a good setting for a human tragedy: 'The Patagonia was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old- fashioned gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature."

A contempary reviewer in 1888 in the "Literary World" was struck by the same thought: "The Patagonia' is a story of a voyage from Boston to Liverpool, wherein a very natural and lifelike picture is drawn of the petty interests and small scandals which serve to beguile a voyage. There is no better ' school for scandal' than an Atlantic liner, and in the case of the Patagonia a fund of gossip is pro vided by the somewhat pathetic story of Grace Mavis, a handsome girl who is going to meet her fiance at Liverpool and to be married at once. She has been engaged to Mr. Porterfield, a very worthy and devoted individual, for ten years, but he has been ' faintly pursuing' his profession in Paris nearly the whole of that time, while she has remained at Boston. Grace Mavis belongs to a less fashionable circle than that of her good-natured chaperon, Mrs. Nettlepoint, and during the voyage she sees rather too much, for her own peace of mind, of that lady's fascinating son. The end of her history is a sad one, but it is natural and well worked out."

I checked over several of the versions of this novella for Kindle using the free samples. Despite the range of prices, there does not appear to be any real difference between the texts, and no additional material provided to help the reader understand the novella in any greater depth.

We enjoyed this novella very much -- it reads very well aloud where the parenthetical clauses are clearly delineated and can be delivered verbally with only a slight change in tone, to make them easy for the listener to understand.

Robert C. Ross 2010