The Princess Casamassima (volume 1 of 2)
1948
A young bookbinder in Victorian London discovers his birthright is tangled with nobility and revolution. Hyacinth Robinson, raised in poverty by a dressmaker who took him from his imprisoned mother, possesses a sharp mind and finer sensibilities that set him apart from his working-class world. When he falls in with a circle of politically motivated radicals, and then into the orbit of the mysterious, beautiful Princess Casamassima, he finds himself drawn into a dangerous game of revolutionary idealism and clandestine purpose. The Princess, wealthy and restless, moves through London's underground political networks with her own mysterious agenda, and she sees in Hyacinth a useful instrument for her causes. What follows is a devastating psychological portrait of a man caught between classes, ideologies, and the terrible weight of his own contradictions. James renders Hyacinth's internal crisis with harrowing precision: the bookbinder who cannot forget what he has read, the revolutionary who cannot commit to violence, the lover who cannot escape his own nature. This is political fiction stripped of comfortable certainties, a novel that asks what happens when idealism meets the complexity of human feeling.
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“You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.””
— Henry James
“I don't care how I live, nor where I live," said Millicent, "so long as I can do as I like.””
— Henry James
“He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips -- sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feelings that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him, and laid her finger-tips gently on his hand. So, for a minute, while his tears flowed and she said nothing, he felt her timid, consoling touch. At the end of the minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said "we" just before, and he asked her whom she meant.””
— Henry James
“But, after all, the opinions of our friends are not what we love them for, and therefore I don't see why they should be what we hate them for.””
— Henry James
“Haven't you kept anything?" Hyacinth went on, without heeding this challenge.She looked at him a moment. "I have kept you!””
— Henry James
“I believe those that are on top the heap are better than those that are under it, that they mean to stay here, and that if they are not a pack of poltroons they will.””
— Henry James
“I am convinced that we are living in a fool's paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet.""It's not the ground my dear; it's you that are turning somersaults," Madame Grandoni interposed."Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.””
— Henry James
“This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with an irrelevance that characterised her, that she didn't care anything about a man's family if she liked the man himself; she thought families were played out.””
— Henry James
“She wondered why a prison should have such an evil face if it was erected in the interest of justice and order–an expression of the righteous forces of society.””
— Henry James
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Princess Casamassima (volume 1 of 2) by Henry James free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Princess Casamassima (volume 1 of 2) by Henry James free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3Cite this book
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James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima (volume 1 of 2). Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3.James, H. (1948). The Princess Casamassima (volume 1 of 2). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima (volume 1 of 2). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-princess-casamassima-volume-1-of-2-56ec18ee-878a-4b70-a1e4-a53784937df3.
