Recommendations
Books Like The Europeans
Best books to read after The Europeans by Henry James
Henry James's light comic novel (1878) brings two cultivated Europeans — the Baroness Eugenia Münster and her artist brother Felix Young — to visit their American cousins, the Wentworths, near Boston, generating comedy from the contrast between European worldliness and New England moral earnestness. These recommendations extend the experience through James's other international novels, through other American-in-Europe fiction, and through Austenian comedies of manners.
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Daisy Miller
by Henry James
Published the same year and the most direct companion piece: where The Europeans brings Europeans to America, Daisy Miller sends an American girl to Europe. Together the two novellas form James's most concise statement of the international theme — the comic version (The Europeans) and the tragic version (Daisy Miller).
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Washington Square
by Henry James
James's most Austenian novel after The Europeans: the story of Catherine Sloper, a plain, rich woman in 1840s New York pursued by the charming but penniless Morris Townsend, and her cold-blooded father who refuses to be taken in. Washington Square shares The Europeans' lightness of touch and its New York setting, while adding a darker edge.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
The major novel that follows The Europeans and deepens its international theme: Isabel Archer's story is the full-scale tragic version of the American-in-Europe situation that The Europeans handles with lightness and comedy. Reading The Europeans first gives you James's themes in their most accessible form before encountering them in their most complex.
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
The closest literary ancestor to The Europeans: James's comedy of manners, his ensemble of marriageable characters, his interest in the gap between what people profess and what they want, and his sympathetic but ironic narrator all derive from Austen. Reading Pride and Prejudice alongside The Europeans reveals how deliberately James was working in the Austenian tradition.
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The Bostonians
by Henry James
James's satirical novel about Boston reform culture — the world of The Europeans taken seriously and pushed further. Where The Europeans treats New England earnestness with gentle comedy, The Bostonians subjects it to sustained satirical analysis. Both novels show James's ambivalence about American moral culture: admiring its integrity, skeptical of its narrowness.
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The American
by Henry James
James's first major international novel (1877), published just before The Europeans: Christopher Newman, a wealthy American businessman in Paris, attempts to enter French aristocratic society by marrying a widowed noblewoman and is defeated by social barriers he cannot understand. The American is the serious version of The Europeans' international comedy.
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Emma
by Jane Austen
The Austen novel that The Europeans most resembles in structure: a small ensemble of characters in a limited social world, a matchmaker protagonist (Felix) who brings people together, comedy arising from the gap between what characters understand and what the reader sees, and marriages at the end that reward the right pairings. James's debt to Austen is clearest in The Europeans.
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The Reverberator
by Henry James
James's short 1888 novel about an American newspaper correspondent who inadvertently publishes the private affairs of a French aristocratic family — another comedy about the collision between American naivety and European social codes. The Reverberator is The Europeans' shorter, later twin: the same lightness, the same international subject, the same comic resolution.
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