What Maisie Knew

Henry James constructed one of the most unsettling narratives in English literature by placing us inside the mind of a child. When Beale and Ida Farange divorce, they dispatch their young daughter Maisie like a diplomatic pouch between warring nations. Each parent corrupts the girl to wound the other, filling her head with tales of the other's monstrousness. But Maisie sees everything, and understands nothing, or perhaps everything. The brilliance lies in James's refusal to give us an adult narrator explaining the horror. We are trapped in the child's limited perception, watching the grown-ups perform their cruelty, watching Maisie learn to perform love for whoever currently holds her. By the novel's end, we cannot be certain what she has become, or what she knows. It is a novel about what adults do to children when they are too selfish to remember they were ever young.