In the Cage (Paperback)

Henry James's 1898 novella In the Cage (written in the same year as the more well-known The Turn of the Screw) is a sly, slight, vaguely sentimental work but one that acts as a fine introduction to this most convoluted of writers. Exact ("exacting" yet with a pointillist's precision) is the word most often used to describe James's prose but very often the modern reader will find his hesitant, pedantic, clause-heavy sentences difficult to follow, overlong and tortuously complex. But the key to reading and enjoying James is in succumbing to those very sentences, allowing his perfect ear and fine metre to establish its own rhythm, letting it guide one's response to his beautiful, matchless use of language.

In the Cage tells the story of a young women, the "betrothed of Mr Mudge", who works at a post-office counter sending telegrams mostly from the "idle rich" to their fellows to arrange their meetings, parties and other affairs. Concerned, as ever, with the plight of the not so well-to-do--and particularly the role and circumstances of women--James finely delineates our heroine's increasing preoccupation with Captain Everard for whom she sends a considerable number of messages and about whom she has increasingly warm thoughts: "people of her sort... didn't count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly as what".

Caught between the modern (this is a tale of communications as well as of communication) and the Victorian (this is a tale of manners and repression; class and its debilitating strictures) In the Cage may well be James-lite but it is not any the less charming, compelling, wry and intelligent for that; and this ultimately very amusing book is a wonderful gift for the right kind of reader. --Mark Thwaite --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.

IN THE CAGE - 1898 - IT hacl occuned to her cnrly that in hex-position - that of B ouilg perso11 spending, in framed and wired confinenlellt, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie-she sllould know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That illade it an cinotio lt l em ore lively - tliough singularly rare and always, eren then, with opportunity still rcry mucl1 smothered-to sec any one come in vhom she kncir, as she called it, outside, and who co lld add soincthing to the poor identity of her function. EIer function was to sit there with two young men-the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk to mind the sounder, which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, inore apartments, Simpkins, Ladles, Thrupps, just round the corner, was so select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these emblems-she pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no more to her than one of the momentary appearances in the great procession and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connection-only recognised outside indeed-to which she had lent herself with ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised the others the less because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge. But she was a little ashamed, none the less, of having to admit to herself that Mr. Rludges removal to a higher sphere-to a more commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhoodwould have been described still better as a luxury than as the simplification that she contented herself with calling it. He had, at any rate, ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday. During the three months that he had remained at Cockers after her consent to their engagement, she had often asked herself what it was that marriage would be able to add to a familiarity so final. Opposite there, behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls and more present, too present, hs had been for a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future. She was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once. They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate. She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an office quite similar-she couldnt yet hope for a place in a bigger-under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, hourly, and in a part, the far N. W. district, where, with her mother, she would save, on their two rooms alone, nearly three shillings. It would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it was something of a predicament that he so kept at her still, it was nothing to the old prcJicainents, those of tlic early times of their great inisery, her own, her mothers, i ld Ilci elder sistel. s--the last of vhoin llnd succunrl ccl to all b u t nbaolutc want V-hen, as conscious, i lcretul lous ladies, suddcilly bereaved, hctrayed, ovcr rhclmed, they had slipped faster and faster donrll the steep slope at the bottom of never rcl ouncletl ally more at the bottonl than on thc way 11ad oilly ri- i lbleadn d gruinblcd down and tlowil, nialiiilg, in 1-cspect of caps and conversation, no ellbrt vhntevcl-a, ilcl too often, alas smclling of r-hisliy...