Product Description

This book comes with an introduction by Pat Righelato, University of Reading. The child of parents who divorce, remarry and then embark on adulterous affairs, Maisie Farange survives by her intelligence and spirit. For all its sombre theme of childhood innocence exposed to a corrupted adult world, this novel is one of James' comic masterpieces. The outrageous behaviour of the characters on the seedy fringes of the English upper class is conveyed with wit and relish. The dual perspective of a sophisticated narrator richly appreciative of the absurdities of the adult sexual merry-go-round and the candid vision of Maisie, 'rebounding' from one parent to another like a 'shuttlecock', together create an 'associational magic'. Strangely, unexpectedly, from so much that is tawdry, comes a tale of moral energy and subtlety. James' foresight was in understanding the modernity of his subject, which is even more relevant today in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28696 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
The most comprehensive paperback edition available

The editor presents the latest scholarship on James in an edition that includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times

Reset with wide B format pages to give generous margins for notes

Customer Reviews

Beautiful
This is another classic from the James collection. What Maisie Knew is a masterpiece- the reader has an ant's eye view of the adult world through Maisie's eyes. Essentially we witness the violent pumelling of a young child by her parent's manipulative scheming; she is used throughout as a go-between and epitomises,sadly, the position many children find themselves in when a divorce is handled terribly by parents. Maisie becomes intertwined in an adult world of bitterness, violence, sordid affairs and irresponsibility yet luckily, the tale is saved from the depths of sordid tragedy by the lovely Mrs. Wix who takes Maisie under her wing, so to speak, and shows real affection. James very much enforces the notion of parental responsibility in this incredibly poignant tale of a little girl.

What Maisie tell us
At a dinner party in 1892, Henry James heard about an unusual divorce settlement in which the child was not, as was usual given to one parent to bring up, but was to alternate between them. Interested in the potentialities of this situation, the seed thus planted grew via a short story, into a novel published in 1897.

The narrative voice telling the story is filtered largely through the child Maisie's perceptions of events and allows her to be the innocent observer, to see all the moral inadequacies, failings and deviousness of adult life without any clear understanding of what it all really means. The reader, however, older, wiser and no doubt more cynical than Maisie, can see the reasons for her perpetual changes of residence between parents, step-parents, nurse and governesses and all the games they play with her life and happiness, for what it really is. This is novel is about the lust and the selfishness that James perceived to be at the centre of London life at the turn of the century.

It is a humorous, warm story, despite the subject matter and it is written with a wit and lightness of touch that allows the reader to observe these deviousand morally frail grown-ups who exert power over Maisie as not without charm. They themselves are buffeted by forces beyond their control. Money, or the lack of it, is central to the experience of all the main characters, all of whom feel entitled to be rich or acquire riches through their own sexual attractions.

The delightful Sir Claude who has real affection for Maisie, the narrowly moral Mrs Wix and Maisie herself, are all great comic creations. The style, as always with James is demanding, slow paced and needs to be read slowly. The pay-off however, is a novel of great richness and satisfaction for the reader. It anticipates later novels such as Atonement and Lolita, both of which, of course, are sexual explicit. Nonetheless, James' novel's acknowledgement that sexual trading is the basis of his society's currency is still shocking, even for readers today, who might have expected otherwise from innocent and more distant days. Plus ca change...