In the Library
Washington Square
Henry James, 1880
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 35
- Length
- Length 64k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Should you like to be left in such a place as this, to starve?
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Honoré de Balzac
Balzac turns the father and daughter story inside out: Goriot beggars himself for daughters who only want his money, the same cold arithmetic of love James learned from him.
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The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Wharton works the same old New York from the inside, where nobody raises a voice and the whole machinery of the tribe moves against you anyway.
£1.99
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Austen also gives us a woman talked out of the man she loves by a relative who thinks he knows better, and then lets her live long enough to answer.
£1.99
About the book
Her father is the cleverest man in New York, and he has decided, privately and permanently, that his daughter is dull. Catherine Sloper is plain, kind, slow and rich, and when a beautiful young man with nothing in his pockets starts sitting beside her at parties, Doctor Sloper takes in the whole business at a glance and is chiefly amused. He is right about Morris Townsend. That is what makes the book unbearable. Being right gives him not one ounce of tenderness, and he walks her up an alpine valley at dusk to ask, in a low voice, whether she would like to be left there to starve. Between a suitor who wants her money and a father who wants to be correct, Catherine learns the one thing nobody set out to teach her, which is her own worth. James makes you watch a dull girl acquire a spine, slowly and at appalling cost, and the last use she puts it to is the quietest refusal in American fiction.