What Maisie Knew

<p>[James] is the most intelligent man of his generation. -T. S. Eliot </p><p> Reading Henry James is like putting a new faculty to the test. This is the true morality.-Anita Brookner </p><p>A very modern story about aimless lives and messy marriages- Paul Theroux</p><p><b>Henry James' <I>What Maisie Knew</I> (1897) is one of the author's most piercing works of fiction am impassioned look at the events of a young girls life as she is shuffled between her self-absorbed divorced parents.</b> In this astonishingly modern novel the damaging constructs of society and the illusions of respectability are seen through the perspective of an unforgettable child from her earliest years until a teenager.</p><p>Maisie Farange only six-years old at the onset of the novel is a child of two narcissistic parents: Beale and Ida who are only using the young child as a pawn in their own egomaniacal games. As the bitter divorce of her parents is settled in split custody the emotional cruelty only increases. She is cared for by two governesses; the homely Mrs. Wix at her Mother's house and the beautiful Miss Overmore at her father's home. As each parent re-marries much younger spouses and those relationship in turn fail Maisie is entangled in a web of moral corruption and psychological abuse. James's tragic story of an innocent child caught between the corruption of the adult world is a thought-provoking and devastating meditation on failed responsibility.</p>