(Spoilers ahead\/don’t read if you don’t want to know what happens in this book.)<\/p>\n
Early in Washington Square<\/em> we meet Dr. Sloper, who married a wealthy woman but is an eminent medical professional with a solid career of his own. He lives with his daughter, Catherine, and his widowed sister Lavinia: his first child (a son) died young, and his wife died shortly after Catherine’s birth. “I should like her to be a clever woman,” he tells Lavinia, when they’re talking about how Lavinia can maybe help with Catherine’s education. Lavinia is perhaps not the best person to raise a clever girl, though: she’s described as “romantic” and “sentimental”, with “a passion for little secrets and mysteries.” And Catherine? By the time she’s in her early twenties, she’s described as “not ugly” and also “decidedly not clever.” She doesn’t have a lot of suitors, and when one man, Morris Townsend, starts to express interest in her, Dr. Sloper assumes he’s just after Catherine’s money (which may, in fact, be true). Dr. Sloper tells Catherine he’ll cut her off if she marries Townsend, and takes her to Europe in an effort to make her forget him; meanwhile, back at home, Aunt Lavinia has Townsend over for drinks on the regular and encourages him in his romantic affections: she tells him her brother will surely change his mind. Dr. Sloper does not change his mind; Catherine and Morris do not get married. Poor Catherine! The girl has no mother, a meddling aunt, a father who she’s convinced doesn’t particularly like her, and a first love she can’t\/won’t get over, even though by the end of the novel when she sees him again, after many years, she thinks about how he “was the man who had been everything, and yet this person was nothing.” <\/p>\n I was hoping for more 1800s New York atmosphere in this book, but there isn’t a ton of it. There is a rather nice description of the area around Washington Square, which James describes as “having a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city.” And there are some social occasions that are fun to read about, and a few strolls, and a secret rendezvous at an “oyster saloon,” all of which I enjoyed. I feel conflicted about how stoic\/passive Catherine is\u2014on the level of particular scenes, it makes for some very funny\/great moments, like when Lavinia tells Catherine, after an upsetting night, that she should stay in bed for three days and Catherine can’t imagine doing that … but also, it’s fairly depressing, at least the way it’s presented in the book: Catherine is the lively friendly spinster in her social circle, but the book doesn’t show those happy moments, just tells about them, and it ends with a moment of solitude that feels more dark and lonely than peaceful or content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Spoilers ahead\/don’t read if you don’t want to know what happens in this book.) Early in Washington Square we meet Dr. Sloper, who married a wealthy woman but is an eminent medical professional with a solid career of his own. He lives with his daughter, Catherine, and his widowed sister Lavinia: his first child (a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}