Where to Start with Henry James: Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Aspern Papers, or The Turn of the Screw

Henry James has a reputation for sentences that take a paragraph to arrive and for novels in which very little happens for several hundred pages. Readers who try one of the late works first often decide he is not for them. That is a pity, because his short fiction from the 1870s and 1880s is plain, quick, and sharply observed, and it teaches you how to read the later style if you ever want to.

This guide covers four short works, all complete and all available as single eBooks: Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Aspern Papers, and The Turn of the Screw. It describes setting, narration, and what to watch for, and says nothing about how any of them ends.

Daisy Miller: two parts, two cities

The story opens at a hotel in Vevey, on Lake Geneva, where a young American named Winterbourne, visiting his aunt, meets a girl from Schenectady who talks to him freely, travels with her mother and small brother, and seems unaware of the rules she is breaking. The first part stays in Vevey; the second moves to Rome for the winter.¹

Everything is seen from Winterbourne’s side. He is forever trying to classify Daisy, and the pleasure of the story is in watching his categories fail. James subtitled it “A Study,” and the word fits: the material is a few conversations, a boat trip, some walks, and what a small expatriate society says about them.

Start here if you want James at his shortest and most readable. It was first published in 1878, and the Gutenberg text follows the 1879 American book edition. The social stakes may seem small until you notice how much is riding on them for Daisy.

Washington Square: a father, a daughter, and a suitor

In New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, Dr. Sloper is a successful physician whose daughter Catherine is, by his estimate, plain and dull. His widowed sister, Mrs. Penniman, lives with them and reads romance into everything. When a handsome young man named Morris Townsend begins to pay attention to Catherine, the doctor forms his own opinion of the suitor’s motives.²

The novel is told in the third person by a narrator who comments openly and sometimes with amusement on all four people. The thirty-five chapters are short, and the plot could be summarized in two sentences. What holds the book together is the way each character reads the others, and the way the reader is invited to read Catherine more generously than her father does.

Choose this if you want a complete, well-made novel rather than a tale, and if the question of how far a parent is entitled to decide a child’s happiness interests you. Published in 1880, it is the most conventional of the four in form and the most quietly affecting.

The Aspern Papers: Venice and a locked room

The narrator, who never gives his name, is a critic devoted to the dead American poet Jeffrey Aspern. He has learned that Aspern’s lover from long ago, Juliana Bordereau, is still alive, very old, and living in a decayed palazzo in Venice with her niece, Miss Tita. He arranges to take rooms in the house under an assumed name, intending to get hold of whatever letters she may have kept.³

This is a first-person narrative, and the narrator tells you his plan in the first chapter. From then on you watch him explain his conduct to himself. The nine chapters move through a summer of visits, a garden he has had planted as a pretext, and conversations in which three people each want something the others will not say aloud.

Read this if the limited narrators of the other three appeal to you and you want to try a more uncomfortable one. It was published in 1888 and sits between the plainness of Daisy Miller and the denser later manner. The Venetian setting is drawn with care and is one of the book’s pleasures.

The Turn of the Screw: a manuscript read aloud

A group of guests are telling ghost stories by a fire. One of them, Douglas, mentions a manuscript written by a woman who had been his sister’s governess, and some days later he reads it to the company. The manuscript, which forms the rest of the book, is her account of taking a post at a country house called Bly to look after two children, Miles and Flora, with the housekeeper Mrs. Grose as her only confidante.⁴

The frame matters. Everything after the prologue is in the governess’s words, written down later, and there is no one to check her account against. The twenty-four chapters are short, often ending at the moment something is glimpsed or a conversation is cut off, which makes the book hard to stop reading and easy to divide into sessions.

Choose this if you want suspense and do not mind that the book refuses to settle what it shows you. Published in 1898, it is the latest of the four and the one whose sentences most resemble the mature James. It is also, read on its own terms, a ghost story, and the guide to classic ghost stories places it beside M. R. James, a very different writer with the same surname.

Which to open first

If you intend to read all four, the order above is also the order of publication and roughly the order of difficulty. Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw can each be read in a sitting or two; the other two want a few evenings.

Reading a James sentence

Even in these early works, James likes to put the main verb late and to qualify a statement before finishing it. The method that works is the same as for any long sentence: find who is doing what, then go back for the qualifications, which are usually where the judgment is. His narrators and characters rarely say directly what they think of each other. Notice who is being watched, who is doing the watching, and what the watcher wants to be true.

Dialogue in James often means more than it says, and a reply that seems to change the subject is usually an answer. If a conversation leaves you unsure what was decided, that uncertainty is frequently shared by one of the characters, and reading on will tell you which one.

What to be prepared for

Daisy Miller involves illness and social ostracism. Washington Square opens with a bereavement and follows a long campaign of emotional pressure on a daughter. The Aspern Papers is built on sustained deception of two elderly women. The Turn of the Screw concerns possible harm to children and the deaths of former servants, described obliquely but present throughout. None of the four contains graphic violence; the harm in James is mostly done in drawing rooms.

How to read these on BlueReader

Each of the four is a separate Gutenberg eBook. Download the EPUB, upload it to BlueReader, and open it from your bookshelf after server processing.⁵ The chapter divisions in Washington Square, The Aspern Papers, and The Turn of the Screw are short enough to use as session breaks; for Daisy Miller, the break between Part I and Part II is the natural pause.

For a general approach to prose from this period, how to read classic English without looking up every word applies well to James, whose difficulty is in syntax more than vocabulary. The browser reading guide and the free EPUB guide cover the upload steps.