One of the lesser-known or read of the novels of Henry James, this is not without interest for the reader who chooses to enter the realm of this fine author. ( )

Perhaps the weakest of his early novels, even including his first, disowned novel Watch and Ward, despite the fact that James's skills have developed quite a bit with Roderick Hudson and The American to allow a nice interplay between exposition and dialogue.

At times, The Europeans feels like a play—or else that it would work better as a play. We all know that James tried his hand as a playwright with Guy Domville and flopped, almost never recovering from that public failure. In later works, we can see the "playwright" James more seamlessly weaving his novelistic vision in works like The Awkward Age, which is more dialogue than anything else: a script lacking stage directions, and often lacking clarity on who's speaking. Ah, Jamesian ambiguity at its finest!

Here, though, James was confined by two things: his editor wanted a short, 100-page piece after his lengthy previous novel; and his editor also wanted a happy ending—so we have a very compressed plot, with some of the most interesting characters we've yet encountered in James's novels (the Baroness Münster; her brother, Felix; the rebellious, free-spirited American, Gertrude; and some others who don't quite come off the page), which feel, in the novel's quickness and brevity, to be mere caricatures than deftly-drawn characters. And we have an Austenian end that comes far too abruptly and leaves the reader entirely without satisfaction after the drawn out games, intrigue, and sly subterfuge that's come before it.

All in all, though, it's an intriguing experiment in James's oeuvre, in that he tends to focus much more on Americans abroad; here, we have Europeans in America, so we see that inverted: it's not so much how Americans are polluted by (and how they pollute) Europe and the Old World traditions, but rather, how the Old Word can influence them all the same, even on their own soil.

If anything, this proves that James works best with large canvases, as in his finest novels of the late period. Still, this is an interesting, if minor, inversion of The American, if a bit stale and lackluster. ( )

19th c. — Europeans in America
psychological novel — 1/2 truth — 1/2 lie
Baroness + Felix — staid NE family in awe of European Cousins —

Eugenia, the daughter of American expatriates, is the morganatic wife of a German prince, who is being urged to divorce her in favor of a state marriage. She and her artist brother, Felix, travel to Boston to meet distant cousins relatives, partially in hopes of making a wealthy marriage.

Muy buena descripción de caracteres, como siempre en este autor, aunque parece más una obra de relleno que otra cosa: visita rápida de parientes europeos a sus primos estadounidenses con poco choque de culturas aunque las diferencias sean notables. Matrimonio de uno y vuelta a Europa de la otra, sin mucha historia antes o después. Entretenido. ( )

I rather liked this story. Some liken James to Jane Austen. In my opinion, this novella seemed more like a Shakespearian Comedy where characters are thrown together and torn apart all orchestrated by the Baroness Munster aka Eugenia and her brother Felix who have come to Boston for money and love but, instead, creates chaos for those seemingly attached. Written in the usual late 19th century prose but readable non the less.
Edit | More ( )