Is it possible that the “ghosts” in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw are not ghosts at all but rather projections of the governess’s own sexual anxiety and moral confusion? In this essay I bring to bear sources which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been studied in relation to The Turn of the Screw. The questions guiding my reading are: What effect did Henry James’s association with Lord Houghton and his Cannibal Club, Erotic Biblion Society, and the Philobiblions have on James’s The Turn of the Screw? What effect, if any, did Slang and its Analogues, by James’s friend William Ernest Henley, have on the language and the symbolism of James’s tale? To what extent, if any, did James find models for The Turn of the Screw in the widely circulated works of erotica written, translated, and published by Houghton’s societies, specifically the anonymously published The Romance of Lust? This paper argues that James encoded a fairly obvious erotic subtext into The Turn of the Screw and begins the process of decoding that text.
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Sometime late in the year 1877, Henry James moved into the home of his “guide, philosopher, and friend” Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton.[1] It was while living with Houghton that James met Alfred, Lord Tennyson and William Gladstone and arranged the meeting of Ivan Turgenev and Gustave Flaubert.[2] But Lord Houghton was not only a collector of famous people; Houghton possessed, after Henry Spencer Ashbee, the most important collection of erotic and pornographic literature in England.[3] James was familiar with the content and conventions of this literature.[4]
Houghton introduced James to his club the Philobiblions, members of which overlapped with at least two other clubs established by Houghton: the Erotica Biblion Society of London and New York, and the Cannibal Club.[5] Among their diverse literary activities, these groups collected, wrote, translated, and published volumes of erotic literature.[6] Hundreds of especially French erotic novels were clandestinely imported and circulated in this manner, and James’s own library at his death contained between 100 and 150 “French books” which his family saw fit to discard, their titles unrecorded.[7]
Whatever the content of these “French books,” the fact that James knew erotic literature and referred to it in his own work is undeniable. Leon Edel, discussing James’s use of “erotic books, called ‘naughty’ or ‘unclean’ in Victorian days,” writes that “In the 1879 edition of The American, James removes from the earlier printing the erotic classic he had mentioned, Les Amour du Chevalier de Faublas (1789-90), a licentious novel by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray (1760-97) in favor of the more sophisticated Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Cholderlos de Laclos (1741-1803), a novel about a seducer and his victims.”[8] Henry James was conversant with this literature and aware of its many gradations.
A similar circumstance arises in the case of another friend of Henry James, the poet and essayist William Ernest Henley. From 1890 to 1904, Henley collaborated with John S. Farmer in the production of the monumental Slang and its Analogues, an unexpurgated dictionary in seven volumes that draws heavily from erotic sources. The dictionary is based on historical principles, giving the earliest known bibliographical reference of each word’s use, along with extensive lists of parallel terms from related French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese works. James’s library contained several books by Henley, and there is reason to believe James was acquainted with Henley’s dictionary of sexual synonyms.
In Henry James, A Life, Leon Edel relates an incident in which, at a weekend party, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and George Gissing collaborated in writing and performing a short play. According to Edel, James’s contribution to this enterprise was the name of one of the characters: “Peter Quint Prodmore Moreau,” a curious yet obvious precursor to Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw.[9] When we examine this name in light of Henley’s dictionary, we find that among the most common English synonyms for penis is “peter,” while one of the oldest terms for vagina is “quin—also same as the old word queint,” as found in Chaucer twice as well as in Florio.[10] With “prod” a not improbable synonym for intercourse, this rather elaborate name can be read as: Peter (penis) / Quint (vagina) / prod / more! / more! / au! (or “oh!”), in other words, as an analogue for sexual intercourse. Such an interpretation lends substance to what several commentators have long suggested: that Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw, who is always referred to as “standing,” “active,” and “erect,” always “bareheaded” and “never a gentleman,” is meant to be taken as a symbol of the governess’s fear of sexuality.
Other common sexual synonyms taken from Henley’s dictionary include “flower” (Flora) and “old woman” for vagina. The governess, when she believes Flora to be in secret contact with Miss Jessel and thus no longer innocent, describes the child, rather oddly, as an “old, old woman.”[11] Equally significant is the name “Grose,” which appears on virtually every page of Henley’s dictionary, in reference to Francis Grose, author of the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a principal source for Henley’s research. “Grose” reappears, of course, as the name of the governess’s confidante in The Turn of the Screw. Although not found in Henley’s dictionary, “Miles,” Latin for soldier, calls to mind the common sexual slang for penis, that is, the little soldier who stands at attention. Miles is repeatedly referred to as the “little gentleman,” with similar sexual overtones. These correspondences, and many others, are more than coincidental.
Before proceeding any further on the matter of James’s use of sexual synonyms, I would like to suggest a possible source for James’s tale. Together the anonymously published The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences (1873-1876), The Pearl (which refers to The Romance of Lust), and My Secret Life comprise the three most important and widely circulated works of Victorian erotic literature. Published and also most likely written by members of Houghton’s Cannibal Club, The Romance of Lust purports to be the memoir of a man of advanced years recalling his lifetime of amorous adventures, starting with his earliest sexual experience.[12] Regardless of whether James had come to The Romance of Lust by way of Houghton, or by other means, upon reading the book he would have encountered the following sequence of events.
Charles, a boy of fourteen, and his two slightly younger sisters, live with their mother on a country estate. The children’s father has long since passed away, and their mother, herself in failing health and no longer able to give the children their lessons, places an advertisement in the Times for a governess. A young lady by the name of Evelyn applies and is hired.
Charles complains to his mother that she treats him as though he were still a child, that she “was blind to the fact that I was no longer what I had been.”[13] The boy feels it is “not natural” for him to be at home rather than at school, but he is forced to make the best of it (3).
It soon becomes clear to the boy that his new governess is strongly attracted to him, and he feels similarly drawn to her. The boy is totally ignorant of sex, until “some visitors arrived”—a young married couple—who, first by example and then by practice, initiate the boy into these mysteries (12). The boy, in turn, initiates his two sisters. The children hide their secret from their governess, devising stratagems whereby they can meet without her knowledge. At this point, disturbing appearances begin to haunt Miss Evelyn in the form not of spirits, but of physical manifestations of the boy’s awakened sexual interest (erections visible within his trousers). These physical signs, when they intermittently appear, confuse and trouble the young governess. During one of these appearances there occurs an “accident” when the governess embraces the boy too closely. Charles observes of his governess:
I often noticed the increased sparkle of her eyes and changes of color in her face when she kissed me, and I put up my hand and caressed her cheek. At times she would push me away, and beg me to resume my seat; frequently she would leave the room in an agitated manner, till this led me to suppose an internal conflict was going on, and that passion urged one course, reason another. (90)
Just as the governess’s predicament is about to reach its crisis, the mother decides to travel to town for a day, taking her two daughters with her. The boy and the governess are finally alone: “Miss Evelyn, almost pale as death, and quite visibly trembling, falteringly begged me to go to our school-room and study the lesson she had given me the previous evening, saying she would join me shortly” (92).
The governess returns to the school-room terrified by her passion and dreading the ruin she may bring upon both herself and the boy. Her emotions, however, overwhelm her:
At the moment I really felt quite distressed at the sad expression of her features. For an instant she smiled languidly, then, by some compulsion of feeling, she seized me in both arms and drawing me to her bosom, covered me with kisses; her eyes became perfectly brilliant. “Oh, you dear, dear darling boy, I love you beyond expression.” (92)
The two cling into a passionate embrace. The governess, who is a virgin, and the boy, who pretends to be ignorant of sex, encounter some difficulty at first, but soon find their way, whereupon the boy dies in her arms.
Of course, the boy doesn’t actually die. To “die” is a common metaphor for achieving orgasm. Hence in The Romance of Lust we have “I lay like a corpse on her body… this death-like swoon lasted some minutes” (54), “the death-like swoon of satiated passion” (96), and so on. The metaphor of death and rebirth is used repeatedly to this end. At this point, it is worth reminding that Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw is said to have died from “a visible wound to his head” but later comes back to life (325).
Indeed, the similarities between The Romance of Lust and The Turn of the Screw are remarkable, especially when we accept that there are no ghosts in The Turn of the Screw and that the appearances which haunt the governess are her own projections of what she has yet to face: the fact of sexuality—that is, of Peter / Quint. What the governess requires of Miles is some sign that he too understands and desires what she feels exists between them. Otherwise, the enormity of her act would be too great: “if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?” the governess asks herself (401).
On one level, it appears obvious that The Turn of the Screw is a story about a young woman’s sexual anxieties, and not ghosts. In the story’s framing tale, the first thing the character Douglas tells us about the governess is that she was in love, although we are not told with whom (293). When the governess meets her employer in London, he is described as “such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” (295). The governess accepts the position primarily because of “the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it” (297). And yet the governess is immediately cast away from this splendid man, without any hope of seeing him again. Her newly awakened sexual appetite is forced to seek other objects and other channels.
When the governess is first introduced to little Flora, she delightedly remarks, “She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen… I slept little that night—I was too much excited” (299). Describing her impression of Flora to Mrs. Grose the following day, the governess is told, “If you think well of this one!… You will be carried away by the little gentleman!” (301). To which the governess replies, “Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away.… I’m rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!” (301). But all too quickly the governess’s infatuations take a troubling turn.
Musing that it would be “charming… suddenly to meet someone,” the governess is immediately confronted by Peter Quint and then Miss Jessel, both of whom personify sexuality (310). She learns from Mrs. Grose that Quint “was much too free… Too free with everyone!” (323). The governess reacts with a “sudden sickness of disgust” (323). She is told that there was not just “something” between Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, “There was everything,” that Quint “did what he wished” with her, and “with them all,” leading to Jessel’s ruin, and to the corruption of the innocent children (331). The shock produced by this intelligence (since the governess is telling her own story) is easily seen as a product of the governess’s own sexual anxieties and moral confusion.
The governess’s sexual feelings, and especially her attitude to the children, present an almost textbook case of transference. Immediately after first encountering Peter Quint, the governess exclaims to Mrs. Grose, “He was looking for little Miles” (322). After the first appearance of Miss Jessel at the lake, where Flora attempts to fit a mast into her little boat, the governess exclaims, “They know—it’s too monstrous: they know, they know!” (328). What exactly is it that Miles and Flora know? Precisely what force or power has been transferred to them? A hint is given by the governess’s description of the scene. She says of the encounter with Miss Jessel:
“She gave me never a glance. She only fixed the child.”
Mrs. Grose tried to see it. “Fixed her?”
“Ah, with such awful eyes!”
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. “Do you mean of dislike?”
“God help us no. Of something much worse.”
“Worse than dislike?”—this left her indeed at a loss.
“With a determination—indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention.”
I made her turn pale. “Intention?”
“To get hold of her.… That’s what Flora knows.” (330-31)
It is not difficult to read “to get hold of her” with “a kind of fury of intention” as a synonym for sexual lust, and the immediacy with which the governess transfers the destructive sexual impulses of Quint and Jessel onto the innocent children Miles and Flora suggests that this thought had been germinating in her mind before the appearance of Quint and Jessel, and that her growing obsession with the children as sexually conscious beings is fueled by her own repressed desires.
What occurs next is a long and almost too obvious process of sexual grooming. After the governess’s shock of learning about the close relationship in fact of Quint to Miles and Jessel to Flora, we read:
I had of course returned to my students, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Flora’s special society and there became aware—it was almost a luxury!—that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. (333)
The sexual overtones in the above passage are almost comically obvious—“cultivate,” “plunge… into Flora,” “luxury,” “put her… hand straight upon the spot that ached”—especially when they are followed by the governess’s guilt over her feelings for the children and her growing apprehension of being found out:
I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would yield.… I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstance that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting.… There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them and pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that? Doesn’t it betray too much?… For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations. (338-39)
By this point in the story Mrs. Grose has become understandably alarmed and fearful for the children’s welfare. As she is illiterate, she pleads with the governess to write to the children’s uncle requesting that he come to visit. The governess agrees to do so but never does. The governess also confiscates the children’s letters written to their uncle and fails to post them. She has virtually made the inhabitants of Bly her prisoners. But to what end? The answer lies in the governess’s growing obsession with Miles, and her desire that he reciprocate her feelings. But how could she possibly broach such a subject?
I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no need of striking a match—I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they say, “had” me. He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears. He “had” me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would absolve me, who should consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? (349)
Among other things, the governess’s state of mind illustrates the sad but all too common instincts of approach and avoidance exhibited by sexual predators. In this instance, as it turns out, the governess chooses not to press the point with Miles, but shortly thereafter the matter takes a turn she had been dreading all along. Miles declares he wants to leave Bly, asking the governess “when in the world, please, am I going back to school?” (360). Miles continues:
“You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady always—!” His “my dear” was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned.
He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. “Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but, after all, I’m a fellow, don’t you see? that’s—well, getting on.” (360-62)
The governess’s fear of losing Miles, the pain of once again facing her “slighted charms,” and the desire to bring her relationship with Miles to a head at last, result in the fourth appearance of Miss Jessel, whom the governess addresses as “You terrible, miserable woman!” (365). Of course, the governess is actually speaking about herself and her own predicament. So we must ask what precisely the governess means by “miserable”? Miserable because of her disappointments in the past? Because of her present uncontrollable desires? Or because of some desperate exploit she imagines for the future? The answer seems to be the last, as the governess reflects, “I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated” (360). Accordingly, in the very next chapter the governess begins a campaign to upset little Flora and drive her and Mrs. Grose out of the house with the goal of leaving her alone with Miles.
Before this “final act” can be concluded, however, the governess attempts one more time to seduce little Miles. She enters his room at night when he is in bed. The subject of his returning to school comes up again. The governess relates:
It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles—!”
My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with indulgent good humor. “Well, old lady?”
“Is there nothing—nothing at all you want to tell me?”
He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. “I’ve told you—I told you this morning.”
Oh, I was sorry for him! “That you just want me not to worry you?”
He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him; then ever so gently, “To let me alone,” he replied.
…
It made me drop to my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing him. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you only knew how I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, and I’d rather die than give you pain or do you wrong—I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles”—oh, I brought it out now even if I should go too far—“I just want you to help me to save you!” But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note of either jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. “Why, the candle’s out!” I then cried.
“It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles. (372-73)
In spite of all the carefully placed misdirection that James employs, the general content of this action is clear. A pretty young woman comes into a young boy’s bedroom at night, falls to her knees beside his bed, throws herself upon him, kisses him, embraces him, whereupon we are told there occurs “an extraordinary blast,” a “shake of the room,” as if “the casement had crashed in,” while “the boy gave a loud, high shriek… of either jubilation or of terror,” concluding with the boy stating that he “blew” his “candle” out—that is, ejaculated. Once again, the employment of sexual symbolism and synonymy is almost comic in its obviousness. It is also worth noting that this scene in The Turn of the Screw occurs in the exact same point in the plot as does the “accident” in The Romance of Lust where the governess embraces Charles too closely and he ejaculates in his trousers.
The precise expression the governess uses just before the climax of this scene—“I just want you to help me to save you!”—requires some explanation. As we have seen, Quint “did what he wished” with the former governess and “with them all,” particularly spending time alone with Miles, suggesting that the boy may have been sexually abused (331-32). Miles is subsequently dismissed from his school because, the governess presumes, he was “an injury to the others” (304). When pressed about his dismissal, Miles explains to the governess that he “said things” (400). Pressured by the governess, he explains that those whom he said things to are “only a few. Those I liked” (400-01). The implication appears to be that Miles was expelled for talking about homosexual acts and/or for propositioning boys he “liked” (400-01). We should also remember that Miles has already told the governess that he is bored with the company of women and that “I’m a fellow, don’t you see? that’s—well, getting on.… I want my own sort!”—that is, the company of other men and boys (360-62). As homosexual acts were a crime in Britain at that time, the governess may be thinking that by offering herself sexually to Miles she might thereby “save” him from a life of homosexuality.
Henry James knew that he could not tell such a story straight out, and that was never his intention. Rather, as I have suggested, he resorts to symbolism and sexual synonymy. As has been argued several times, sexual symbols abound in The Turn of the Screw. Some are obvious: windows for virginity, towers and candles for phallus, and, as I have already suggested , the crucial moment in which Flora attempts to fit a mast into a hole in a little boat she has made, the observation of which disturbs the governess to an unaccountable degree and produces the first appearance of Miss Jessel.
Still other symbols are more recondite: in the final meeting of Miles and the governess, the young man, with hands in pockets and standing above the governess, smiles as he gazes down at “the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment” (393). In the context of the tale “the joint” would seem to refer to the leg of lamb on the table. But why should he find it humorous? The answer is found both in the conventions of erotic literature, and in Henley’s dictionary, where a “bit of mutton” and “la jointe” are both sexual synonyms for vagina.[14] A moment later, the governess reports, Miles was “at me in a white rage,” a synonym for ejaculation (402). The governess then relates: “he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped” (403). There James’s story ends, not with a death, as is often assumed, but with the consummation of a sexual act.
If one is willing to entertain the possibility that James is playing a kind of game with his readers, using sexual synonyms that would be readily decipherable to the initiated but merely suggestive or puzzling to the ordinary reader, then The Turn of the Screw takes on an entirely different character. This does not mean that the tale becomes any less serious a work of art. Quite the opposite. It suggests a level of verbal sophistication virtually unmatched. Nonetheless, by viewing the work through the lens of some of James’s intended readers, men like Lord Houghton and the Philobiblions, countless passages open themselves up to obvious sexual interpretation. Earlier in their final scene, for example, we have the following exchange between Miles and his governess:
“I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?”
“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better.… Come here and take your mutton.”
…
We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!” (389)
Here we have four fairly obvious sexual innuendos in short order: trouble with “Little Flora,” “she’ll presently be better,” and “take your mutton,” followed by a descriptive passage which situates this exchange in a fitting dramatic context: a young couple finally alone on their wedding night.
Reading The Turn of the Screw in light of Henley’s dictionary, and the conventions of erotic literature which Henry James certainly knew, a hundred or more passages in the story exhibit the same obvious and pervasive level of sexual innuendo. Again, this is beyond coincidence. Although critics may resist the idea that a sexual reading is what James primarily intended, one can hardly deny, given James’s knowledge of erotic literature and his personal connection with its devotees, that James would have been constantly aware of these interpretive possibilities, and this awareness alone would have exerted an influence on his composition of the tale, an influence which demands further study.
Oscar Wilde once described The Turn of the Screw as “a most wonderful, poisonous little tale.”[15] We may never know exactly what Wilde meant, but it is entirely possible that the whole of The Turn of the Screw, from its suggestive title to its famously puzzling last sentence, is an extended exercise in sexual synonymy, the practice of which had been partially hidden by its author’s intentional acts of misdirection. As Douglas’s introduction to the tale relates, this story, which is unmatched not in terror but in “dreadfulness” and which has been locked away in a secret drawer for decades, will tell what happened between a woman and her lover, but tell it “not in any literal, vulgar way” (294). In this, we can say, Douglas was entirely correct.
Notes
- Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Volume II: 1875-1883, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 110, 198. ↑
- Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 209. ↑
- Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (New York, NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 286. ↑
- James, Letters, Vol. II, 198. ↑
- James, Letters, Vol. II, 114-15. ↑
- Gershon Legman, The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964), 67. ↑
- Leon Edel, and Adeline R. Tintner, The Library of Henry James (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 71. ↑
- Edel, Henry James: A Life, 71. ↑
- Edel, Henry James: A Life, 532. ↑
- John S. Farmer, and William Ernest Henley, Slang and its Analogues Past and Present, Volume V.—N. to Razzle-Dazzle (Printed for subscribers only, 1902), 177, 351. ↑
- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (New York, NY: New American Library, 1980), 378. All citations of The Turn of the Screw hereafter refer to this edition and appear in text parenthetically. ↑
- See Sarah Bull, “Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860 – c. 1900,” Book History 20 (2017): 226-57. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5989922/. ↑
- Anonymous, The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1968), 3. All citations of The Romance of Lust hereafter refer to this edition and appear in text parenthetically. ↑
- Farmer and Henley, Slang and its Analogues Past and Present, Volume V, 351. ↑
- Oscar Wilde, quoted in Roger Gard, Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1968), 4. ↑