The Spoils of Poynton Annotated edition by Henry James Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : The Spoils of Poynton Annotated edition by Henry James Literature Fiction eBooks 
This ebook includes a biographical introduction, a short, critical analysis of James' career and a brief introduction to this work.
Originally serialised in the Atlantic Monthly under the title The Old Things, The Spoils of Poynton was first published in book form by Heinemann in 1897. The plot centres upon the valuable antique possessions housed in the home of Adela Gereth which her son Owen, poised to marry the unrefined Mona Brigstock, is clearly coveting. The fourth character, and the principal point of view, is a typically Jamesian female lead called Fleda Vetch who seeks to mediate within the family but who also becomes an object of attraction for Owen.
Unusually for a mid to late period James novel, The Spoils of Poynton is more dependent upon plot than might be expected. While the characterisations do move the novel along, they come out second to what's happening and, true to that sense, James supplies an ending that has both resolution and a certain convulsiveness.
The Spoils of Poynton Annotated edition by Henry James Literature Fiction eBooks
Whoever thought Henry James could write a really funny book? It may not be Catch-22, or Enderby, or Lolita, but it reeks and drips with irony and has genuine laugh-out-loud scenes, especially starring Mrs. Gereth, who is blunt about pandering Fleda to her feckless son. Spare and incisive, with only a disagreeable surfacing now and then of James' 'late' style (ponderous and unnecessarily intricate, making you read over sentences five times to extract their meaning), This is the first book he wrote after the excruciating failure of the play Guy Domville (see Leon Edel's bio, if you can stand cringing at the way James was treated) and he apparently said to himself: "I will show these cretins how a real writer writes." You cannot go wrong if you like James.Product details
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The Spoils of Poynton Annotated edition by Henry James Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
There are no spoilers for The Spoils of Poynton in these comments, but there are spoilers for The Ambassadors and Portrait of A Lady.
I have great respect and admiration for Henry James, but this is not one of his best efforts. A pretty good novel, but not one of his best efforts.
The plot is set in motion by the following events a mother and father have spent their lives collecting beautiful objects, which are housed in their dwelling at Poynton. They have a son who is a kind of jolly, well-meaning English upper class bloke, insensitive to the beauty of the objects. The father dies and, under English law, the son inherits everything. The son falls in love with a girl very much like himself. His mother fervently wants control of the objects and befriends another girl, our heroine, with the sensitivities the mother would like to see in a daughter-in-law who would cherish the objects.
The events and emotional entanglements that follow are quite tense. This book has a more active plot, more twisting, and turning, than you usually associate with Henry James. There is something closer to a physical love scene than I can recall in any other of his novels.
The ending is a bit of a deus ex machina.
Only the mother and our heroine, whose name is Fleda Vetch, are fully characterized. Henry James lavishes all his powers of witty, incisive, allusive, and complicated character description on these two. The other characters are cursory. The mother is energetic, aggressive, self-centered, and rather likable for her down-to-earth focus. Fleda is one of those self-defeating morally punctilious James protagonists, who snatches self-justification from the jaws of satisfaction time and again.
The prose is James' elaborate middle style, fun to follow but not easy, building up characters and situations with a million smart observations, but he is too fond of calling characters "magnificent" or 'luminous'.
I say I'm fond of Henry James, but I find myself angry with him when his protagonists damn themselves to mediocrity at the moment a rich life is within their grasp over what seems to me ridiculous moral compunctions. Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors could perfectly well settle down with Maria Gostrey in Paris to a rich and meaningful life if he didn't have a painful horror of having profited from others' mistakes. Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady could divorce her husband and have a passionate marriage with Casper Goodwood, if she would drop the obligation to suffer for her own mistakes. It is a measure of James greatness that I care enough about these people to be really angry with him.
Most of the characters of this sort in James are scrupulously honest; Fleda is a variation. She lies all the time. She is chronically dishonest with the other characters and with herself, but for the highest of motives, or at any rate the most self-defeating.
James aficionados will know that he is fond of dimly significant names. His notebooks are replete with several lists of such names and musings on what a person with such and such a name would be like. I understand about "Fleda" - she flees, literally running away from an admirer at one point, as does Isabel Archer. But "vetch" is an agricultural product like alfalfa that is fed to cattle and sheep. Fleda is a pert little thing, not in the least bovine or ovine.
SPOILS is not one of James' triumphs. It isn't one of his yarns that bears rereading, unlike a half-dozen others. If you're a completist, you'll want to read it; otherwise, stick with PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THE BOSTONIANS, THE AMBASSADORS and the handful of obvious others.
James writing broad satire? Who would have thought!
19th century literature...either like it or not....but if you like to read , try it
Henry James' Spoils of Poynton is a jewel--quite a prize indeed. His shorter fiction and essays are among his most balanced efforts. He's a writer who is constantly obsessed with polishing his work. And the larger the piece the more cumbersome and tedious that polishing often becomes for him. This small work with few of the devisive distractions that seem to haunt his major projects, contains some his crispest and most telling dialogue. And you may feel in certain succinct instances that you have somehow entered profoundly into the pysche of that character for a moment Here, at least on those rare occasions, James' subtlety and charm counterbalance his observation of human cruelty with all the poise the author may have wished..
Whoever thought Henry James could write a really funny book? It may not be Catch-22, or Enderby, or Lolita, but it reeks and drips with irony and has genuine laugh-out-loud scenes, especially starring Mrs. Gereth, who is blunt about pandering Fleda to her feckless son. Spare and incisive, with only a disagreeable surfacing now and then of James' 'late' style (ponderous and unnecessarily intricate, making you read over sentences five times to extract their meaning), This is the first book he wrote after the excruciating failure of the play Guy Domville (see Leon Edel's bio, if you can stand cringing at the way James was treated) and he apparently said to himself "I will show these cretins how a real writer writes." You cannot go wrong if you like James.
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