What Maisie Knew is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Chap-Book and (revised and abridged) in the New Review in 1897 and then as a book later that year. I wonder why he abridged it? It tells the story of the sensitive daughter of divorced, irresponsible and narcissistic parents. The book follows the title character from earliest childhood to precocious maturity. So what did readers and critics think of the book? Well, it has attained a fairly strong critical position in the Jamesian canon. Edmund Wilson, whoever that is, was one of many critics who admired both the book's technical proficiency and its judgment of a negligent and damaged society. When Wilson recommended it to Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, Nabokov said he thought the book was terrible. F. R. Leavis, on the other hand, declared the book to be "perfection". The psychoanalytic critic Neil Hertz has argued for a parallel between James' narrative voice and the problem of transference in Freud's Dora case. He doesn't have to argue it with me, I don't know what he's talking about so I say okay, whatever you say.



As for the story, after her parents’ bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled between her selfish mother and vain father, they share custody of her and really, neither one seems to want her, they only want her as a way to provoke each other. In fact they fought in the court for full custody, but it ended up being joint custody, and neither parent really wanted her anyway. It seems to be a thing divorced couples do every now and then. What is different from divorces with children that I know is one parent will have her for six months, then the other parent will have her for six months. The divorces I know of, the custody of the children is usually every other week, or one parent has the child during the week and the other on weekends. But poor Maisie gets to spend every minute of six months with each of these people. So Maisie grows up solitary, observant, and wise beyond her years. Poor girl. Both parents eventually remarry, and the new spouses are nicer to the girl than her own parents are. Then there are the love affairs. As time goes on she is drawn into an increasingly entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual betrayal until she is finally compelled to choose her own future.



So what did Maisie know? Probably she knew her parents were horrible people and horrible parents when she was very young already. She probably knows that her new step-parents love her much more than her real parents ever did. And she probably is very, very glad this isn't a long book so she can get away from all of them as soon as she can. I know I am.

I am in the staff room It's nearly 2 o'clock I have to be brief to take down something of the emotion and reasoning of what it feels like to read Henry James, the one who exceptionally difficult for this book figures among those that are considered hard. I read it in translation by Marguerite Yourcenar , one of those creative intellectuals who were sensitive all their life to the hidden expression that lay behind individual persons and likewise was interested in lives of persons whose characters she made into the novels. Henry James took interest in the form. For him it represented the outward facet, the one seen from exterior. It is the cover of everything, of life, of art, of literature. The form is everything. It covers the sense, the meaning of everything. It is a slow process to go behind this form. In this novel What Maisie knew the narratiors, not always H. J: put in before our very eyes, us the readers the gradual coming to knowlesdge, or pre-knowledge, or losing the innocence an eight yeat old child Maggie Farrange , who in the battle of adults, in a brutal of divorce of her parents and later with their second spouses became a helpless ploy into tge adults hands. This is a great novel in that it takes the reader as in a vertigo in morality and duplicity of good society and its norms and morals. The novel is highly interesting. The little girl in front of her elders and those that life put as her guardians or well-meaning persons who wanted to help' or comfort her, is marvellously touching and charmingly innocent , or not so always , for she seems to draw on her inocence herself in order to produce the desired effect. Maisie has to learn and even long befire she is actuallz mature of norms and values of what well meaning and decent society call morality, what is good and socially acceptable. because wors are liable to deceive, words are nothing if not kept under control. It 's hard, the lesson that life has provided to Maggie It is the sense of wrong but also of what is good and bad from the point of view of society. It is about well bred and upstarts and adventures that Maggie has to take into account at such an early age.Henry James was fascinated all his life about innocence in culture , in an Europe of good breeding but unstable and moving socially, about travels that put prospective to new things and upheavals that resulted. It is the novel that is like a living adventure, or an effect of talks around certain events like diviorce and its sequals. Peple talk and Maisie looks on, absorbing under her eyes And what she has seen she will surely grasp the fuller significance in due time, in her more mature years. But she certainly has learnt something out of interactions with her adults and intuitively by giving some of them her love and confidence with the sense something vague that may be also a moral sense. Or who knows.
Now this novel requires thinking and reflecting on I will be reading and reareading Henry James . and Proust may help me. Aleady La Prisonniere is on my priority list. Henry James is one pure writer who is obsessed with the meaning and the form it takes in interactions that literature gives to them For the novel is a structure that a novelist such Henry James takes on, the best possible for him to tell the unsaid. It is late I must hurry on I will be back Or just one more or two minutes about thus form of unsaid

Think of little tambour boy from the ballad which Henry james himself mentions at the very first page, Maisie like him is taken in a muddle of emtions , befire the different innuenoes ad rest. And the effect is astounding all the more as it rests in silence! Ballads teach and tales teach us Henry James knew very well that there is a potential of the story behind the cases of strafe and all the more in a solent look of a mute participant, of his or her unknown feelings or mute comprehension. . Must be going Be back really

James has a knack both for creating monsters and weaklings. This book seemed to contain nothing but, and depending on how you look at them, each its possible to see each character as being a bit of both. On the surface, it all drives towards a big moral choice for Masie. But I keep thinking that the choice is ultimately false. There's so much baseness underlying each of her options, that it was hard for me to see it as a moral choice at all. Did she do the right thing? Did she even end up with the capacity to tell right from wrong? I don't think its clear at all.

And I also saw the finality of the ending as being very arbitrary. Nothing would stop any of the characters from flip-flopping once again and re-crossing the channel. If there was a finality, it was in Masie's being able to make a decision, whether it was right or wrong. And James might insist upon this, but I'm not sure that I really buy it.

What I liked most about this book is how James handles Masie's very troubling upbringing. He does a great job of showing a very shrewd child growing up with no moral example whatsoever. Her openness, and her keen perceptions without any conventional understanding of how things "ought" to be, are at times delightful.

What I didn't like so much this time was the writing. Sometimes Jame's dialogue is just awful. Especially when he falls back on the form of one person saying something vague but slightly ominous. The next repeats the same thing in the form of a question, usually asking who it was directed. The first then repeats the phrase, perhaps making it even vaguer, but adding a pronoun at the end with emphasis. The second person, the repeats the sentence again, but changes the pronoun. He does this shit again and again, and it gets old and tiresome. Either that, or he understood that monsters tended to talk in this incredibly annoying, and monstrous fashion.

Then there are some of his pet phrases. I'd like to be able to smack him once for every time he uses the phrase "hung fire." Other than a Rolling Stones song, does anyone else ever use this expression. Or did he somehow take a copyright or trademark on it, so that it becomes a Henry James special. Another writer would take serious heat for so frequently relying on a phrase like this. I know James is not sacrosanct, because I've seen some absolutely brilliant parodies of his later style. But I do sometimes wonder -- he has a very distinct and strong style, but in the last couple of books I have thought it got in the way more than it helped. Was it growing pains, as he developed his late style? Did he force the late style onto stuff where it didn't fit in his post-publication re-writes? Or are these books somehow just not as good as the late, great books -- or for that matter, the early, straightforward books like Daisy Miller and Washington Square.

This book had a serious case of verbal diarrhea. Sentences ran on and on to the point where I lost my train of thought. No can do - finishing this book would drain my brain - torture.

Another book to try again perhaps sometime.

I have nothing important against it, save that when I was listening to (splendidly read by Elizabeth Klett) audiobook I got confused who, with whom was scheming. Who, with whom had or wanted to have an affair. It was almost like listening to some kind of XIX century "The Bold and the Beautiful".

I totally sympathized with Maisie, and it is sad that similar families and children struggle nowadays too.

But, I don't feel there is much more in the story than I got after sixteen chapters. More manipulations, more ignoring and using the child, and probably a sad (moralizing) end. I understand what Henry James wanted to say, I don't need more of the specific events.

Because I have a Master's degree in English, I occasionally figure I should read a classic or two. But then I end up with a classic like this, which makes me wonder how it became a classic in the first place. Sure, Henry James knows how to write a sentence. But this book is literally just the same people having the same argument over and over in front of a child for 200+ pages. That's it. Just a group of adults arguing about custody of a child that none of them actually seem to want; they just don't want any of the others to have her.

I've avoided Henry James for years, fearing tedium and long, involved sentences. But this is a very concise, ttight little book.

Whew! This is one of the most tiresome books I've ever read. The only reason I finished it is so I could add it to my list of completed books for the year. I hate Henry James!

When I saw that this book was about a young girl whose parents divorce and both remarry, and how she is shuttled between the various adults that have some reponsibility for her, I wondered why it wasn't in the Ultimate Teen Book Guide in place of 'Daisy Miller'. But the reason for that became clear as soon as I started reading it.

The language is very difficult, with sentences that go on for line after line without ever arriving at an obvious meaning. I was often getting to the end of a paragraph and thinking, "Huh?" It was like reading a book in a foreign language where you understand the individual words, but cannot always make sense of the sentences. You hope the next sentence will make everything clear - but it doesn't. I mean sentences like this:

"The case was indeed that the quality of [Mrs Wix's] motive surpassed the sharpness of her angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost."

The idea of using language like that to present a child's point of view is bizarre, but it had the effect that I had as much trouble as Maisie understanding what was going on emotionally with the various parents and step-parents, although for a different reason. I think that must have been deliberate on James's part because it gets easier as the book progresses (and as Maisie gets older). I don't think we are ever told how old she is, but the plot must span several years. The final section, set across the Channel in Boulogne, is wonderful. So in the end I have given it 4 stars although at the beginning it sometimes had me wanting to throw the book across the room.

This was very structurally unhinged and gloomy but boy he can write! Maisie was a bold essence form of character
This went up from a 3 star at th start to a 5 so quickly!

I first got to know Maisie in a contemporary movie. Maisie was a young girl and her her parents weremn’t getting along. The movie piqued my curiosity as to what had Henry James said/had written. And was curious what time period he set Maisie in and what kind of family.At one point in my life I started reading him a lot. Though there are many I still haven’t yet read. Vanessa Redgrave was in a lot of the movies made of his books. I wanted to read the books after seeing the movies. We had to read Turn of the Screw in Junior High and It had an adverse. effect.i would like to reread it. Funny how you gravitate to an author or certain classics during different periods of life.

An only child of divorced parents is passed around among half a dozen adults of varying relationships to her (nannies, parents' new lovers, second spouses), all of whom are unfailingly selfish and incapable of framing her well-being in any terms other than what suits them. Admittedly anyone in the world who claims to be acting in a purely disinterested manner on any occasion is probably not telling the truth but this presents a notably pessimistic view of human nature. Written in 1897, close to James' legendary difficult late period of 1902-4, the prose is not as challenging as The Golden Bowl et al - elegant and lightly ironic.