examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralising frame through which Englishlanguage novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. Hadley argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping him to leave behind a way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the s as explorations of how disabling and distorting ideals of women's goodness and purity were learned and perpetuated within English and American cultural processes. These explorations, Hadley argues, liberated James to write the great heterosexual love affairs of the late novels, with their emphasis on the power of pleasure and play: themes which are central to James's ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure-class society.
In this paper I discuss What Maisie Knew in three different contexts, in relation to learning to read. First, I talk about my own experience of reading the novel, aged fourteen or fifteen—not understanding much, but piecing a reading together out of fragments, and feeling the novel's complexity as a promise of complexity in real things. I discuss teaching the novel to students, helping them build an understanding of its meaning from the bottom upwards, out of the detail of the text. Finally I discuss the novel's own preoccupation with a child's learning to perceive meaning and value in the life around her.
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