JULIA BRIDE (Illustrated)

"Julia Bride" is a story in which the subjective tragi-comedy of a sordid situations are deployed with infinite skill, a sort of dehumanized humor, and the rarified verbal atmosphere of ten thousand feet above sea level. If one had just finished The Ambassador — if one had been, so to speak, touring for some time above the clouds — then one could read this with the purest enjoyment.

Julia Bride is written in Henry James's most characteristic manner.

Men and women who are doing things and feeling what comes to them in the course of hard work and trouble will find about as much entertainment in it as they would in a book on internal etiquet. But James does not write for this class. His stories are for those who have leisure to cultivate their delicacies and spiritual manners to the remotest decimal point. What he writes means all and more than anybody else could mean about the exquisite niceness of superfine people.

"Julia Bride" is a pretty woman who enjoyed youth too much in her earlier maiden days and has a reputation for too many discarded lovers. Also she is handicapped now by a mother with a series of divorced husbands to her discredit. Now Julia wants to marry into a good, rich family and these things are against her. The expedients she resorts to in order to cover them are the incidents in the story. But the interest of it is her feelings.

Originally published as a thin, red-bound little volume of just a pretty woman's feelings in what any other novelist would show as a very ludicrous or tragic predicament. In the end she does not get married and live happy ever after, she simply rushes home and casts herself, face downward, in an agony of chagrin because, to cover her frolicking record she must help an old lover and his wife top the social ladder to where she will be when she does marry.

In short, the story is a textbook in snobbery written with the most discriminating sensibility.