The Other House
Encyclopedia
The Other House is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

, first published as a serial in the Illustrated London News
Illustrated London News
The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper; the first issue appeared on Saturday 14 May 1842. It was published weekly until 1971 and then increasingly less frequently until publication ceased in 2003.-History:...

in 1896 and then as a book later the same year. Set in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, this book is something of an oddity in the Jamesian canon for its plot revolving around a murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

. The novel was originally planned as a play called The Promise. James sketched a scenario for the play in 1893, but it didn't interest theater managers. In 1896 James converted the scenario into The Other House for publication in a popular weekly magazine. Interestingly, he converted the novel back into a play in 1909, but it again failed to be produced.

Plot summary

Julia Bream dies after giving birth to her only child, a daughter named Effie. Julia had a horrible stepmother, so she extracts a promise from her husband Tony never to marry again as long as Effie is alive. Several years pass. Julia's old school friend Rose Armiger is in love with Tony, though she is ostensibly engaged to Dennis Vidal. In an effort to overcome the promise Tony made to Julia, Rose drowns little Effie so Tony will be free to remarry.

The crime
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...

 is discovered but family and friends decide to hush things up. Family physician Dr. Ramage convinces the authorities that Effie died of natural causes, Rose is sent off with Dennis Vidal, and all the people involved become, legally, accessories after the fact
Accessory (legal term)
An accessory is a person who assists in the commission of a crime, but who does not actually participate in the commission of the crime as a joint principal...

 to murder...and they get away with it.

Key themes

Many have speculated that this strange tale of murder and a cover-up was influenced by Ibsen's
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...

 grimmer plays. There may be something to this idea, because in the 1890s James was championing Ibsen as his plays became known in England.

James seems to have liked the way he dramatized his material in The Other House. In his Notebooks
Notebooks of Henry James
The Notebooks of Henry James are private notes made by the Anglo-American novelist and critic. Usually the notes are of a professional nature and concern ideas for possible or ongoing fictions, but there are a number of personal notes as well...

he plans a section of his novel The Ivory Tower
The Ivory Tower
The Ivory Tower is an unfinished novel by Henry James, posthumously published in 1917. The novel is a brooding story of Gilded Age America...

"after the manner in which the first book is a prologue in The Other House. Oh, blest Other House, which gives me thus at every step a precedent, a divine little light to walk by..." But James did not include The Other House in the New York Edition
New York Edition
The New York Edition of Henry James' fiction was a 24-volume collection of the Anglo-American writer's novels, novellas and short stories, originally published in the U.S. and the UK in 1907-1909, with a photogravure frontispiece for each volume by Alvin Langdon Coburn...

of his fiction (1907–1909), one of the few later novels not to make the cut.

Critical evaluation

With near-unanimity critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

s have dismissed The Other House for its glaring problems in motivation and credibility. To some extent James may be the victim here of expectations concerning his fiction. Outside of this work, few of his characters
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

murder children. So when Rose Armiger does exactly that, it's so out of line with James' usual material that critics might automatically reject it as unbelievable. But even allowing for such expectations, Rose hardly seems like a driven, semi-insane "bad heroine" out of Ibsen. She comes off like what she is, a well-bred young lady doing something that it's very hard to believe she would do.

For a more favorable view of the novel, see the link to the NYRB introduction in "External links" below. This essay begins by characterizing the book as the unfairly selected "ugly duckling" of the Jamesian canon. The author then blames Leon Edel for the novel's unfortunate status, though other critics (see the referenced books of criticism) have also dismissed The Other House as one of James' most forgettable efforts.
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