Washington Square
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the genteel parlours and tree-lined streets of 1840s New York, Washington Square presents one of literature's most quietly devastating portraits of manipulation and betrayal — that of Catherine Sloper, a plain, dutiful, and painfully earnest young woman whose modest inheritance makes her the target of the charming but mercenary Morris Townsend. Her cold, brilliant father, Dr. Austin Sloper, sees through the suitor's designs with surgical clarity, yet his relentless intellectual cruelty towards his own daughter proves just as damaging as any scheming lover's deceit. Henry James constructs this domestic tragedy with the precision of a master craftsman, trapping Catherine between two men who, in their own distinct ways, use her without ever truly seeing her. James's genius lies in his restraint — there are no grand villains, no melodramatic confrontations, only the slow, suffocating weight of social expectation and misplaced love rendered in immaculate prose. Washington Square stands as one of his most accessible yet thematically rich works, a sharp psychological study of power, inheritance, and the quiet devastation wrought upon the sensitive by the calculating. First published in 1880, it anticipates the deeper psychological complexity of his later masterpieces while remaining perfectly contained in its ironic, almost clinical tragedy. The question James ultimately leaves the reader to wrestle with is not whether Catherine will find happiness — but whether, having been so thoroughly shaped by those who claimed to love her, she ever truly had the chance.
Author: Henry James
Format: Paperback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the genteel parlours and tree-lined streets of 1840s New York, Washington Square presents one of literature's most quietly devastating portraits of manipulation and betrayal — that of Catherine Sloper, a plain, dutiful, and painfully earnest young woman whose modest inheritance makes her the target of the charming but mercenary Morris Townsend. Her cold, brilliant father, Dr. Austin Sloper, sees through the suitor's designs with surgical clarity, yet his relentless intellectual cruelty towards his own daughter proves just as damaging as any scheming lover's deceit. Henry James constructs this domestic tragedy with the precision of a master craftsman, trapping Catherine between two men who, in their own distinct ways, use her without ever truly seeing her. James's genius lies in his restraint — there are no grand villains, no melodramatic confrontations, only the slow, suffocating weight of social expectation and misplaced love rendered in immaculate prose. Washington Square stands as one of his most accessible yet thematically rich works, a sharp psychological study of power, inheritance, and the quiet devastation wrought upon the sensitive by the calculating. First published in 1880, it anticipates the deeper psychological complexity of his later masterpieces while remaining perfectly contained in its ironic, almost clinical tragedy. The question James ultimately leaves the reader to wrestle with is not whether Catherine will find happiness — but whether, having been so thoroughly shaped by those who claimed to love her, she ever truly had the chance.