Travelling Companions »

Henry James was a master at tracing the social boundaries of the Gilded Age -- between Old and New World, Europe and America, desire and convention, men and women. He brought an invaluably clear-eyed, and critical, sensibility to America's evolving cultural mores.

This is a collection of seven stories which were written between 1868 and 1874 and were first published in magazines. Travelling Companions (1870) reveals the young James' joyous reactions to Europe. Professor Fargo (1874) presents in all his mock-finery a strutting charlatan who practices mesmerism in the seedier country towns of New England. The tale represents the young writer's horror of American vulgarity. In Guest's Confession (1872), a jealous older brother takes sadistic revenge by exacting a release from financial obligation from the father of his younger brother's fiancee. Adina (1874) was one of James' first attempts at fiction of the supernatural and De Grey: A Romance, also a quasi-supernatural story, first exposes James' obsession that the consequences of marriage can be literally mortal: "As she blossomed and prospered, he drooped and languished. While she was living for him, he was dying for her."