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“I Trust You Will Detect My Intention”: The Strange Case of Watch and Ward
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
At the opening of a magnificent career in fiction, Henry James's first novel, Watch and Ward, has appeared gauche, bizarre and unaccountable. With its overtones of incest and paedophilia, it is hard to imagine what James can have been thinking of. Yet he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, whose opinion he respected, apparently assuming that Norton would understand what he was trying to do. Perhaps a text offered with such optimism is not quite the anomaly it seems at first sight: it may in fact have been conceived within a context and in response to circumstances clear to its author but long since obscured.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995
References
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