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316 The nineteenth century<br />

Irish; Ford Madox Ford was of German extraction, changing his original<br />

surname, Hueffer, to the more English-sounding Ford in 1919.<br />

An American by birth, Henry James also stands ‘outside’ Britain,<br />

although his education was divided between America and Europe.<br />

He was deeply attracted to European culture but explored it from the<br />

perspective of a sophistcated New York background. When the First<br />

World War broke out in 1914, James became a British citizen.<br />

His early novels, such as The Americans (1877), Daisy Miller (1879)<br />

and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), explore differences between European<br />

and American high society. The main point of view is that of an ‘innocent’<br />

character who undergoes conflicts between innocence and experience.<br />

The novels are written in the manner of a Bildungsroman (a growingup<br />

novel) and in them he reveals considerable depths in understanding<br />

female psychology. In What Maisie Knew (1897), the narrative is<br />

recounted almost completely from the point of view of a child’s<br />

consciousness and understanding. Maisie is 6 years old when her parents<br />

divorce and she is forced to live alternately with both of them. The<br />

novel is a considerable technical and formal achievement, as James<br />

manages to re-create a child’s world and to use language to represent<br />

her thought-processes and perceptions. In later novels such as The<br />

Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors, James’s style is even more<br />

subtle, in order to render complexities of thought and feeling in the<br />

‘stream of consciousness’ of the main characters who are each in different<br />

ways ‘outsiders’ in their society.<br />

James was always deeply concerned with art, and how art both<br />

shapes and reflects life. From the short story The Figure in the Carpet,<br />

which shows a concern with the mysteries and intricacies of a design,<br />

to his fine novel The Golden Bowl, art, artifice and their role in human<br />

life are probed and evaluated.<br />

The Prince continued very nobly to bethink himself. ‘Didn’t we<br />

get you anything?’<br />

Maggie waited a little; she had for some time, now, kept her<br />

eyes on him steadily; but they wandered, at this, to the fragments<br />

on her chimney. ‘Yes; it comes round, after all, to your having<br />

got me the bowl. I myself was to come upon it, the other day, by<br />

so wonderful a chance; was to find it in the same place and to<br />

have it pressed upon me by the same little man, who does, as

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