Princess Casamassima [Hardcover]

Henry James (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1976 | ISBN-10: 0844632503 | ISBN-13: 978-0844632506

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

When Henry James chose to, as he did in The Princess Casamassima, he could write about the political turbulence of his era with astonishing excitement and directness. The London underworld of terrorist conspiracies that entangles his hero, Hyacinth Robinson, comes alive under his pen with a violence that seems, 100 years later, only too familiar. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York and settled in Europe in 1875. He was a regular contributor of reviews, critical essays, and short stories to American periodicals. He is best known for his many novels of American and European character. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Inc (June 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844632503
• ISBN-13: 978-0844632506
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,799,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry James (1843-1916), the son of the religious philosopher Henry James Sr. and brother of the psychologist and philosopher William James, published many important novels including Daisy Miller, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taming His Inner Anarchist, January 9, 2006

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Princess Casamassima (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

The Princess Casamassima is fascinating for the way it takes James out of his comfort zone to depict the social world of workingmen, dressmakers, shopgirls, pub goers and (most improbably) underground revolutionaries in late Victorian London. I've heard the novel criticized for James's knee-knocking in confronting the 'social question': uneasy about the inequality it was built upon, his privileged world glittered too brightly for James to ever really denounce it.

But in the person of his "little bookbinder" Hyacinth Robinson, he gives it a valiant try, along the way bringing a lot more complexity--if not much documentary accuracy--to social problems than you get in many other writers, then or now, who take on the disadvantaged as their subject. No book's made me understand the British class system more sharply than this one. James's subtle eye reminds you how much was said by the cut of a glove, the smoothness of a hand, or the slight drop of an 'h' in England c. 1885. He's also sensitive to the way charity can be an expression of power (especially to those on the receiving end) and how mixed the motives can be when well-meaning fortunates "take up" the cause of the poor. The idea of the poor itself gets complicated as James delves into the various shades separating bookbinders from theater fiddlers from chemical experts from impoverished but titled aristocrats.

I think James was picking a bone with himself in this novel, since the same question--whether equality (what we'd probably call "social justice" today) should be achieved at the expense of the beauty and grace wealth provides--comes up over and over again. Kind of like the school busing question writ large. I think the frustrating thing about the novel is that James didn't know how to answer, so just kept writing new scenes. In the end, he falls back on the "religion of friendship" I think he calls it somewhere, a determination to see people, whatever their station, as individuals first and put their personalities above abstract theories. But he's also sharp enough to realize the personalities he likes most are the exceptional ones with intelligence and taste, not the "average" that reigns when everybody's equal. It's a muddle, but one that James tackled with his usual love for detail and appreciation for the complexities of human relationships. After the first few chapters, I had trouble putting it down.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unusual Political Novel, September 16, 2000

By 

Jim McKenna - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Princess Casamassima (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This is James's only overtly political novel. Before reading I wondered how a man of his background could write about working class political conspirators. He does so by making his protagonist an exquisitely sensitive young bookbinder who becomes involved in a political movement he only dimly comprehends. The bookbinder, Hyacinth, is befriended by the Princess Casamissima, a charming, completely self-absorbed young beauty who is trying to find herself in radical political activity. The plot is, therefore, more of a fairy tale than a realistic portait of "typical" working class revolutionaries, but on its own terms it is plausible enough. The style is leisurely and fairly complex, but not nearly as convoluted as James's last works.

The great value of this book lies in its nuanced characterizations. All of the characters are wholly rounded and believable, and while they are all flawed in some way, not one of them is wholly unsympathetic. The Princess is the most interesting of all; through her James shows how bored, unsatisfied aristocrats can dabble in radical politics with disasterous results. He does so, however, without reducing her to a caricature.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Princess Casamassima and Determinism, August 14, 2006

By 

Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Princess Casamassima (Paperback)

When Henry James wrote THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA in 1886, he left the polite, drawing room society of effete and erudite snobs pontificating endlessly at one another for the decidedly lower class world of thugs, anarchists, and terrorists. Europe, then, as the Mid East is now, was full of internal dissension, with Marxist anarchists dreaming of plots that would soon reach fruition in Russia in 1917. The intellectual clime was also rife with a sense of deterministic fatalism that suggested that man was a pawn of a cobwebbery of political, social, and economic events totally beyond his control. There was little one could do, its proponents argued, but to meekly go with the flow. It was against this twin background of anarchy and determinism that James wrote this book.

Hyacinth Robinson is a child born of an illicit romance between a French prostitute and an English lord. After his birth, his mother kills his father with a knife and is sentenced to life in prison. At birth, then, Hyacinth is consigned to a lower class existence with his world view eminating from the ground up. He is raised by a good-hearted Miss Pynsent, who senses in the boy a chance to rise above his station in life. As he matures, he finds a female playmate, Millicent Henning, who, later in life, will love him unreservedly, but he, in turn, will reject that love. Hyacinth tries to find his niche in the world, and for one of his low caste, becoming a bookbinder will do well enough.

The problem with Hyacinth is that the more he struggles to overcome his humble origins, the determinism that gripped the philosophers of the day sought only to prevent him from climbing out of his rut. Hyacinth, even at an early age, began to intuit that the only way to rise above his station was first to destroy it. Eventually he meets the Princess Casamassima, a lovely but bored wife of a wealthy prince, who is the means by which he can elevate himself and in so doing crush the grubby underside of a society to which he yet belongs. She plays along with him, but to her, Hyacinth is only one whose lowly background matched hers prior to her marriage. For the moment, he occupies her attention. Soon enough, however, she dumps him for Paul Muniment, a revolutionary hustler who does not mind mixing the business of revolution with the pleasure of the bedroom. Muniment entices an all too willing Hyacinth into a presposterous scheme to assassinate an unnamed capitalist. When finally, Hyacinth learns that he has abandoned his former world of drudgery and poverty for the unobtainable world of the now unavailable Princess, he does not belong in either, and in desperation shoots himself.

THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA is not one of Henry James' best books. It is preachy and today's readers do not connect readily with the concept that one's fate is predetermined. Yet, in the fate of Hyacinth Robinson, James starkly depicts a man unhappy with his environment which he determines to alter. The fact that he fails does not negate the intensity of his effort.