What Maisie Knew

Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. His father, Henry James Sr., was a philosopher, while James’s grandfather William was a banker and one of the wealthiest men in New York. James’s brother, also named William, would also become a philosopher. James spent much of his childhood abroad in Europe or in Newport, Rhode Island. James began writing in the 1870s as he continued to move from city to city and country to country, living in Boston; Washington, D.C.; England; and France. James found increasing success in the 1880s and 1890s with his psychological and insightful stories about the monied elite of the U.S. and Europe. But he struggled with depression and never married, leading historians to speculate about his sexuality. James eventually settled in Rye, England, although he continued to infrequently visit the U.S., and died in 1916.

What Maisie Knew was written at the end of the Victorian era. While Henry James was American, by the 1890s he had made England his home and was writing books as much for an English audience as an American one. The Victorian era was the height of the British Empire but also a very socially conservative time, as the tremendous changes brought by international trade and the industrial revolution were met with a strict sense of social norms. This led, as the novel shows, to a deeply hypocritical society that couldn’t help but violate the morals it claimed to uphold. It wasn’t uncommon for wealthy elites, like the Faranges in the book, to engage in extramarital affairs, extravagant spending, and other debauchery.

What Maisie Knew is an important part of Henry James’s bibliography, as the author’s exploration of the social world through a child’s point of view further develops his unique perspective on human psychology. In this sense, the novel is also an important part of James’s contribution to the transition from literary realism to literary modernism and experimental techniques, and it foreshadows key modernist works like Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. At the same time, James also wrote What Maisie Knew as an explicit rejection of a certain kind of popular Victorian novel, specifically Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did. James was disgusted with Coolidge’s neat, unrealistic moralizing and the way her books used the figure of the child to exonerate adult characters. This disapproval led him to write his own book to more seriously explore how parental figures’ selfishness can damage children—a tragic dynamic he saw not as the exception but as the rule in modern society.