Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897)

Abstract

The chapter positions What Maisie Knew as a pivotal text in the turn from the Victorian to the modernist novel. Following a brief introduction to James’s life and oeuvre, the chapter discusses the turn of the twentieth century as a time in which knowledge and identity were reconceived as relational, temporary constructs. What Maisie Knew negotiates this shift on several levels. It depicts fin-de-siècle London as a world of ever-shifting alliances in which even family bonds are dissolved into temporary arrangements. It traces the intellectual growth of its protagonist, Maisie, who under these circumstances comes to embody the modernist relational self. Finally, the shift from authorial to figural narration in the course of the novel foreshadows the loss of epistemological certainty that would preoccupy novelists throughout the twentieth century. The chapter closes with a discussion of the theoretical perspectives critics have brought to the novel, from its canonisation by the formalists to recent discussions of its colonial implications.