Well, I told myself to review more of my 5 star books instead of taking the easy way out projectile sneering at some grisly two star efforts. but it's hard. There are some brilliant Henry James reviews dotted around, and this won't be one of those. I think there's a point in some of these long, long literary careers (it's true of long musical careers too) where you've followed the writer out of the early period into the majestic middle period and you know the late period is going to give you a migraine, and there are a couple of books in the middle period in which everything comes right, the focus, the point of it all (what's he actually on about? Ah yes, I see!!) and for me What Maisie Knew is HJ gambolling and turning handsprings and summersets in the brilliant July sunshine before the dementia of subjunctive clausitis set in for good and they took him away and you could only see him on Tuesday afternoons and then only if you didn't speak. So sad. Give the old fellow a bun and some typewriter ribbon.

HJ had this filtered-point-of-view thing, he banged on about that for his entire career, and here he filters viciousness through innocence, Maisie's rebarbative parents and their sophisticated internecine wars conducted through the medium of their little daughter's hapless life. It's brilliantly upsetting, much more so than any number of Dickens' pathetic put-upon Little Dorrits and Little Olivers and Little Miss Dombeys. Not to badmouth Dickens, you can't, it's actually illegal, but you don't go to CD for psychological finesse, you come to Henry James.

In my humble opinion you can stuff your Portrait of a Lady, that one's an unaccountably popular turkey. What Maisie Knew is second only to The Turn of the Screw in the HJ all time Top Ten, and that's just the simple truth.

What Maisie Knew is an exquisite, highly polished artifact, in a way that reminded me of The Spoils of Poynton, another of my favourite James novels. I was interested to see, after finishing the novel, that these two works were published back-to-back in 1897. Both feature tortuous, even brutal, family relationships—the stuff of tabloids—transmuted into beauty through James’s ethereal, allusive style.

In the case of Maisie, the novel’s chief subject is the havoc wreaked on children by acrimonious divorces: a theme that gives it a curious air of modernity. Immediately after finishing it, I watched a 2012 film adaptation starring Julianne Moore, which transposes the story to a modern New York setting—a successful adaptation in many ways, although I was struck by the relative sentimentality of the modern version and its less ambiguous and dark moral tone. The film also brought home to me how isolated James’s Maisie is, as the sole child in an unfathomable adult world, to an extent that would be unthinkable today.

I read Maisie in an excellent Penguin Classics edition with a very good introduction by Christopher Ricks, and some intriguing supplementary material, such as a brief anthology of contemporary reviews of the novel, and extracts from James’s notebooks illustrating the genesis of the work. I was struck, in the latter, by James’s epiphany—several months after beginning to think through the plot of the novel, in August 1893—that “my point of view, my line [will be] the consciousness, the dim, sweet, wondering, clinging, perception of the child.” This is, indeed, the entire key to the novel’s success, that it is filtered through Maisie’s groping, emerging, touchingly needy consciousness. It is what gives the novel its characteristic dramatic irony. I love that James uses an image from the visual arts, in talking of this as a "line."

Maisie doesn’t quite thematize material and artistic beauty in the same metaliterary way as Poynton, in which a collection of ravishing antiques plays a central role in the plot. There is one very striking scene, though, where the young central figure, Maisie, is ravished by the bric-à-brac in the salon of her father’s American mistress, “the Countess.” The relation between viewer and objects is ironic here, as the Countess and what she represents is anything but beautiful, within the economy of the novel, at least. Maisie is acutely alive to physical beauty, and very swayed by it—notably, the beauty of her quasi-parents, “Sir Claude” and “Mrs Beale” (as Ricks observes, naming practices are notably oblique in this novel—we never learn Miss Overmore / Mrs Beale’s other name). Maisie often gets things wrong, though—or fascinatingly half-wrong. She is an utterly unreliable narrator, through no fault of her own.

Even taking Maisie’s blurred focalization into account, it’s hard for the modern reader not to be disturbed by the figure of the Countess as racial other. She is first seen in the text, alongside Maisie’s father, coming out of a pleasure-ground side show at Earl’s Court, called “Flowers of the Forest,” featuring “a large presentment of bright brown ladies” (“brown all over,” it is specified, in case we were wondering what kind of spectacle this was). Maisie initially wonders whether the Countess—similarly “brown,” and wearing a resplendent scarlet plume in her hat—might have been “one of the Flowers” herself. Given this introduction, the persistent association of the Countess with moneyed vulgarity and moral ugliness is uncomfortable (I couldn’t see anything in the text to undercut or nuance this reading). I was reminded a little—and not in a good way—of the West Indian heiress, Miss Swarz, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

This detail nagged away at me, and it detracted from my overall pleasure in the novel—a shame, when there is so much to like. The characterization is quite superb, with special mention for the charming, weak, vacillating Sir Claude and the sublime Mrs Wix, Maisie’s frumpy, devoted governess—in a way the true heroine of the novel, or at least its tragicomic moral core.

A tough but very rewarding read. Maisie has the unenviable lot of being born to a handsome but worldly couple unready for either marriage or parenthood and is used by both parents as fodder for their contentious divorce and subsequent perpetual warfare. One might think that this would be a very dark book ( it was written just after The Turn of the Screw) but that would be without reckoning with Maisie, who is a comic marvel, a little genius and ultimately a heroine. Some say she is a bit of a self-portrait of HJ himself. Her stepfather, Claude, is also very memorable, funny and likeable.

Even though some of James' fiction can be difficult to understand, Maisie is comparatively simple to follow, though you may need to read a sentence again to fully understand it. Reading some of James' sentences is like hang-gliding from the first word to the period—you take in so much information along the way that you're likely to get a bit giddy.

Maisie, a young child caught in the crossfire of her parents' acrimonious divorce, is the protagonist of the book. Used as a pawn in their manipulative games, Maisie is shuttled between her self-absorbed mother, Ida, and her charming but irresponsible father, Beale. As her parents remarry, Maisie becomes entangled in the lives of her new stepparents—Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale (formerly Miss Overmore)—and their own web of romantic and moral entanglements. Through Maisie’s innocent yet increasingly perceptive eyes, James examines the moral decay of the adults around her and her gradual understanding of their flaws.

Maisie begins as a naive child but is exposed to the selfish and immoral behavior of the adults in her life. James masterfully explores how innocence can coexist with an intuitive understanding of human flaws. The novel challenges traditional notions of right and wrong as the adults justify their actions while neglecting Maisie’s well-being. James uses Maisie’s limited but evolving perspective to create a layered narrative, forcing readers to piece together the truth behind the adults’ behavior.

The story of the sensitive daughter of divorced and irresponsible parents, What Maisie Knew, has great contemporary relevance as an unflinching account of a wildly dysfunctional family. The book is also a masterly technical achievement by James, as it follows the title character from earliest childhood to precocious maturity. It's not surprising from the book's title that knowledge and education form a major theme in it. Her keen observation of the irresponsible behavior of almost all the adults she lives with eventually persuades her to rely on her most devoted friend, Mrs. Wix, even though the frumpy governess is by far the least superficially attractive adult in her life. The novel is also a thoroughgoing condemnation of parents and guardians abandoning their responsibilities towards their children. James saw English society as becoming more corrupt and decadent, and What Maisie Knew is one of his harshest indictments of those who can't be bothered to live responsible lives. It might seem that such a book would become almost unbearably grim. But James leavens the sorry doings with a generous dose of admittedly dark humor.

The act of writing to James was a highly delicate operation, as if he were building a house of cards, and the least slip would ruin the design. Though Maisie is not a perfect book, it is filled with James' elaborate literary feats, those suspenseful sleights of hand that always induce pleasurable gasps at each successful intellectual vibration.