The Ambassadors
by Henry James · first published 1903
4mentions
0recommended by
4HN commenters
2017–2026first – last mentioned
100% neutral
Chad Newsome has gone to Paris. He is charmed by Old World fascinations and caught up in the leisurely craft and bohemian direction of European worldliness. An older woman of rank and adventurous but subtle skill, Madame de Vionnet, strokes his ego and does her best to keep Chad in Paris indefinitely. Chad's mother lives in Woollett, Mass., and wants her son to return to run the family business. Mrs. Newsome is an invalid and cannot go to Paris to fetch her son herself, so she employs Lambert Strether and Sarah Pocock to return Chad to Massachusetts. Sarah has been to Paris before and is aware
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
…Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning. Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909: The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find…
on “Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)” ↗How originally do you mean? In Henry James's novel The Ambassadors (1903), a character speaks of going into advertising "Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force."
on “US military intelligence agencies have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows” ↗…> The case of Henry James’s move from handwriting (typewriting) to dictation in the middle of What Maisie Knew has been studied by Hoover (2009). Yet, according to the NYU professor, the author of The Ambassadors took this sudden change in his stride and, despite the fact that we know exactly where the switch occurred, stylometry has been helpless in this case; or, rather, can show no sudden shift in James’s stylistic…
on “Can “Distraction-Free” Devices Change the Way We Write?” ↗…books, in a somewhat increasing order of difficulty: 0) The autumn of the patriarch, by Marquez 1) Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake 2) The third period of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl). 3) The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch I do suggest trying Gormenghast, it's an amazingly written fantasy series.
on “Seven great but notoriously hard-to-finish books” ↗