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all, create bad and capricious mothers in works such as What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton – but because such an approach would not be subtle, would be too easily comic, would destroy the level of moral seriousness that he sought to conjure up in how he displayed his characters and let them respond to each other.
    Dr Sloper’s loss of his wife and second child in Washington Square is seen not only as personal but as professional. ‘For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done poorly in his own family,’ James writes. When Catherine, his only living child, is ten, Dr Sloper ‘invited his sister, Mrs Penniman, to come and stay with him’. Mrs Penniman, whose first name is Lavinia, ‘had married a poor clergyman, of a sickly constitution and a flowery style of eloquence, and then, at the age of thirty-three, had been left a widow, without children, without fortune – with nothing but the memory of Mr Penniman’s flowers of speech, a certain vague aroma of which hovered about her own conversation’. She is interested in melodrama and romance, she is a schemer, she has, James writes, ‘a taste for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for little secrets and mysteries.’
    This allows her to scheme and meddle, it allows her to amuse the reader, but it allows her also to stand in great opposition to Catherine Sloper, despite her efforts to be helpful and supportive. Her presence in the book allows Catherine to be more alone, allows her to become herself with greater force and conviction, allows the reader to see Catherine more clearly, enter her spirit more intensely. Catherine knows how to feel, and the novel is an exploration and a dramatization of this knowledge and these feelings. As the short novel proceeds, what Catherine feels becomes more solid and more complex; she becomes almost heroic in her steadfast solitude, her single-mindedness, her stubbornness. James has taken not only the figure of Fanny Price, the young girl as dull and silent orphan from Mansfield Park , but also the orphan from folk tales, and he has given her a scheming aunt, a loathsome father and a pent-up sexuality. He has also offered her silence, the silence that only the novel can exploit with exact plenitude as it takes over her yearning spirit and allows hermotives a painful complexity. Part of Catherine’s strange nobility comes from the fact that she is alone in the world, her mother is absent, her aunt is a fool.
    In The Portrait of a Lady , written soon afterwards, Mrs Touchett, Isabel’s aunt,
    was a plain-faced old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an enormous respect for her own motives … She was not fond of the English style of life, and had three or four reasons for it to which she currently alluded; they bore upon minor points of that ancient order, but for Mrs Touchett they amply justified nonresidence. She detested bread sauce, which, as she said, looked like a poultice and tasted like soap; she objected to the consumption of beer by her maid-servants; and she affirmed that the British laundress … was not a mistress of her art.
    Thus in his introduction to both Mrs Touchett and Mrs Penniman, James can use a style that one could describe as self-amused. The sentences chosen to describe both aunts, as indeed the very names chosen for these personages, must have been enjoyable to compose. They set a tone, but oddly enough, it is not a tone for the novel itself, which will have a different tone and texture. Rather, they alert the reader that the heroine who will suffer in the book will be alone in her suffering, it will be done in silence, with no terms for it that belong to any woman of the previous generation. These are novels that project the individual as alone in the world, her singleness a metaphor perhaps for how the world is moving and developing, and with