Henry James doc The Works of Henry James, Vol. 01 (of 36): A Bundle of Letters; A Little Tour in France (Moon Classics)

"A Bundle of Letters" is a comic short story by Henry James, originally published in The Parisian magazine in 1879, which is also when the story takes place. The story is one of James' few ventures into epistolary fiction. As he did so often, especially in the early stages of his career, James made the tale part of his international theme: his letter-writers represent a number of different countries. Although some of the characters look like well-worn stereotypes - the wolfish Frenchman, the pedantic and aggressively nationalistic German, the snobbish upper-class English siblings - James manages to endow most of them with enough twists and turns of personality to interest the reader. One character has even been taken as a sly satire on himself. Several residents of a Paris boarding-house write letters to their friends and family back home; their primary subject is their reaction to each other. The main character is Miranda Hope, an angular but likeable Yankee Miss from Bangor, Maine who, quite bravely for a young woman of that era, is traveling in Europe alone. In her letters, she chatters to her mother about seeing the sights in Europe but doesn't like the Old World's treatment of its women, "and that is a point, you know, on which I feel very strongly." Her expressions of petulance with William Platt, who we realize must have been a suitor of hers back in Maine, are so offhand as to be amusing. Although she is in general the least affected and most sympathetic character in the story, her unawareness of the disdain in which most of the characters hold each other (including herself) makes her seem somewhat naive. Meanwhile, society girl Violet Ray of New York writes to a friend that Miranda, who she sees as provincial, is "really too horrible." Another boarder, wannabe aesthete Louis Leverett (quite possibly a self-satire by James) gushes in his letter that "the great thing is to live, you know," amid much precious verbiage about the good, the true and the bee-a-u-tiful. An English boarder, Evelyn Vane, pens a scoffing note that Louis is always talking about the color of the sky, but she doubts if he's ever seen it except through a window-pane; and the German sees Leverett's "decadence" as further evidence that the English-speaking world is weak and ripe for takeover. A Little Tour in France is a book of travel writing by American writer Henry James. Originally published under the title En Province in 1883-1884 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, the book recounts a six-week tour James made of many provincial towns in France, including Tours, Bourges, Nantes, Toulouse, Arles and several others. The first book publication was in 1884. A second, extensively revised edition was published in 1900. James gives the idea for the book in the first paragraph of the first installment of the original magazine serial: "France may be Paris, but Paris is not France." He conceived the book as a description of and even homage to the provinces. James had tried living in Paris before settling in London in 1876. He returned to France in 1882 to discover more of French provincial life than he had previously been able to see. James began his tour in Touraine, then journeyed southwest through Provence, and then north along the flooding Rhône River to Burgundy. The resulting book was a pleasant mix of art and architecture criticism, references to classic literature as well as guide-books and pamphlets, sharp observation of people and places, and knowledgeable discussion of French history and culture - all communicated in an easygoing, urbane, witty style.