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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.
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It was always rather quiet at Cocker's while the contingent from Ladle's and Thrupp's and all the other great places were at luncheon, or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or a book -- a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha'penny a day. This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger life. It had something to do, one day, with the particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was _blas?_; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to "care," odd caprices of curiosity.