Recommendations
Books Like Washington Square
What to read after Washington Square by Henry James
Henry James's Washington Square (1880) is the most accessible of his major novels — a short, precise portrait of Catherine Sloper's impossible situation between her cold father and her unreliable suitor. The best starting point for readers new to James, and one of the sharpest portraits of parental cruelty in American fiction. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's first major novel and the natural next step — Isabel Archer's journey from American freedom to European imprisonment; longer and more complex than Washington Square but establishing the same Jamesian situation in fully developed form; many readers find that Washington Square is the best preparation for The Portrait of a Lady
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A governess who believes she is protecting her charges from malevolent ghosts — James's most accessible Gothic work; much shorter than The Portrait of a Lady and a different genre (ambiguous horror), but shows another dimension of James's range; very widely read and a natural companion after Washington Square
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in Old New York — the same social world as Washington Square, fifty years later; where James's novel is about a father and a daughter in 1840s New York, Wharton's is about a man caught between two women in 1870s New York; Wharton and James were close friends and their New York novels are in deep dialogue
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Anne Elliot, who let herself be persuaded to break off her engagement — Austen is the great predecessor of Henry James in the fiction of social constraint and suppressed feeling; Persuasion is the most emotionally concentrated of her novels and the one most directly analogous to Washington Square: a woman who has been persuaded not to follow her own judgment, living with the consequences
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
James acknowledged Flaubert as the dominant influence on his novelistic ambitions; where Washington Square uses the spare Flaubertian method in a New York setting, Madame Bovary uses it in a provincial French one; reading both novels shows what the method can do with radically different heroines — one too credulous, one too imaginative
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by Gilded Age New York — the other great Wharton novel set in the same social world as Washington Square; where James's Catherine Sloper is too plain and too trusting, Wharton's Lily Bart is too beautiful and too proud; the two women are destroyed by the same social machinery for opposite reasons
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Daisy Miller
by Henry James
Daisy Miller, an American girl in Europe who violates European social conventions without understanding what she is doing — James's most popular short novel (under 100 pages); published two years before Washington Square, it's the best entry point to the 'international theme' that runs through both it and The Portrait of a Lady; quick to read and perfect for new James readers
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's awakening in 1890s New Orleans — Chopin and James were exact contemporaries and both are writing about what happens when a woman insists on her own consciousness in a social world determined to suppress it; where James's Catherine eventually achieves a cold victory over the men who have wronged her, Chopin's Edna cannot find any form of victory except death
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