What Maisie Knew - Henry James

If you have read The Turn of the Screw, you will know that Henry James was deeply interested in the power of adults to have a corrupting influence on children. He returned to this subject in a number of works, most effectively in What Maisie Knew. 

Maisie is the very young daughter of a recently divorced couple who have both rapidly found new partners. She becomes a shuttlecock, passed around by all four adults and a loyal governess. Her parents abuse each other to her, the new partners manipulate Maisie’s affections for their own ends, and the governess sees her as a substitute for her own dead daughter. 

Actually, things are much more complicated than this. James wanted “the centre of the subject . . . to be the consciousness of a child” and made the decision to tell the story from the girl’s point of view. We see Maisie struggling to make sense of what is going on, as her entanglement with these adults is deeply confusing and unpredictable, using her capacity for play and imagination to create a meaning out of the events. As James notes, she “saw more than she had been told, and understood more than she had seen.” The limited, fragmented narrative filter of a young girl leaves us as readers in a state of emotional and moral ambiguity, much like Maisie herself. Because we only see events as Maisie perceives them, we are forced to decipher meaning through implication, subtext, and omission—narrative strategies all typical of later modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

This novel is a deeply moving psychological exploration of a child with a growing awareness of her isolation in a world that no longer offers coherent systems of authority or care.

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JOINING DETAILS:

• Five week study led by Keith Fosbrook and Sarah Snoxall on Zoom
• Tuesdays, 5.00 -7.00 pm (UK) 28 October – 25 November 2025
• Recommended edition, What Maisie Knew, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780141441375
• £200 for five meetings

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