The Jolly Corner and Other Tales

These amusing, subtle and eloquent short stories were composed after 1900 and ponder, in their themes and mood, the sense of unfulfilment and dangerous contingency that may come with age. Having withdrawn from the metropolitan glitter to his house in Rye, Henry James explored the potency of missed possibilities and the shock of the new brash civilization emerging in his native America: his treatment alternates between the humorous and the bleak. Often the stories are comic, but at the heart of them lies a deep sensitivity to life's mute tragedies and comedies, its blank compromises and lost opportunities. The Jolly Corner and Other Tales is a fine example of James's 'late style', rich and refined, compelling and poetic. These short stories have all the depth and charm of the novels and admirably manifest what Roger Gard calls in his Introduction the 'tenderness of a high intellect for the battered experience of the ordinary'.