In the late-nineteenth and very-early-twentieth century, a series of novels was published that explored the relationship between Europe and America, the former characterised as a culture in a state of permanent if gradual decline, the latter characterised as a dynamic society that had not yet acquired much culture of its own. The author of these works was Henry James, born in New England but longtime resident of ye Olde Englande, whose preferred structural device consisted of a wealthy young American woman – an heiress to some vast fortune, made by her father or some other benefactor – who meets a cultivated but impoverished European man – who might be English or Italian, or perhaps an Englishman who lives in Italy – and marries him, with mostly unsatisfactory consequences for her. It turns out that European men with sophisticated taste but meagre financial resources, tended to marry rich American heiresses for their wealth rather than for their intellect and charm. (Had rich British heiresses been available, no doubt they would have been married for similar reasons.)
I enjoy reading James’s novels, and when I reach their final pages I find myself feeling sorry for the spirited young women who have slowly discovered that possession of heaps of money guarantees neither an easy life nor a happy marriage, who find that European men are eager for access to their wealth but reluctant to give up anything much in return. However, James described only a thin slice of English and American society, the sorts of people you find in Jane Austen rather than the wider range – both by geography and class – who appear in George Eliot or Charles Dickens. He was also very much a nineteenth century author – born in 1843, his last major work of fiction was published in 1904 – whose world is no longer our world: his characters travel by steamship and horse-drawn carriage, and live in houses with gas lighting.
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