The Jolly Corner
Henry James
Read The Jolly Corner by Henry James in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/1190-the-jolly-corner.txt.
Description
Henry James's tale appears here from the 1918 Martin Secker edition. Spencer Brydon talks with Miss Staverton in New York. Everyone asks what he thinks of everything, he complains. He begs or dodges the question. His thoughts concern only himself, he admits. He has returned to America after thirty-three years away. He left at twenty-three. He came back at fifty-six. Everything assaults him as a surprise.
The newness and bigness of the changed city overwhelm him. They perform on the scale of his long neglect. He had allowed liberally for change, decade by decade. He saw at last that he had allowed for nothing. Proportions and values stand upside down. The famous modern sights are his sources of dismay. James sets up his ghost story here. Its ghost is the self Brydon might have been.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Henry James |
|---|---|
| COLLECTION | BOOKS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 78 KB |
| LICENSE | PUBLIC_DOMAIN |
| RIGHTS | PUBLIC DOMAIN |
| SOURCE | Project Gutenberg |