Reading Groups

Henry James's The Princess Casamassima with Sheridan Hay

4 Sessions Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT May 8 to May 29, 2025

Online via Zoom

The ‘With Books’ option includes the title required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
5/8, 5/15, 5/22, 5/29
Online via Zoom

Did Henry James write a political novel? Unusual in the Jamesian canon, The Princess Casamassima is a relatively neglected work, dealing not with rarified lives of privilege, leisure, and wealth but with their opposite. The novel explores the half-secret world of radical politics, revolutionaries, assassination plots, and the squalid existence of London’s poor in the 1880s—”the huge tragic city, where unmeasured misery lurks beneath the dirty night.” Owing a debt to both Dickens and Zola, The Princess Casamassima will make Jamesians reconsider their notions of the master’s oeuvre, although his gift as the “historian of fine consciences” was never better illustrated.

Following the character of humble bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, a “presumptuous adventurer, with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity,” The Princess Casamassima is James’s attempt at a naturalistic, broad social documentary picture of contemporary political movements and issues. Written not long after the spate of terrorist bomb attacks and assassinations that rocked London and much of Europe, James’s book does touch upon some larger, recognizably Jamesian, themes—the preservation or destruction of civilization; the transfiguring value of art and the moral beauty of courage, however ambiguously portrayed. The bewitching, beautiful, bored Princess herself is thoroughly Jamesian, while the resentful working men of the ‘Sun and Moon,’ anarchists plotting to foment a socialist revolution, show James at his realist best.

Serialized from 1885 to 1886, the novel is, like all of James’s work, not rapidly read or simply comprehended but perfect for discussion and permanently relevant. James’s opaque style (less convoluted here than the late works) with its qualifications and subtle paradoxes, is strangely matched in a story of secret conspiracy, social disorder, and the appalling cost borne by the great many for the indulgence of the few. The last popular resurrection of The Princess Casamassima was during another tumultuous time—the 1960s. We return to it now, in our own moment of upheaval, as questions of moral action and political will are once again upon us.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read Book One for the first meeting (approximately 100 pages)

What to expect from this reading group: For four weeks we will discuss for ninety minutes the novel under consideration. I will set up the parameters of the discussion for about twenty minutes and then open the discussion to participants for comments and questions, citing specific examples from the text.

Reading List:

The Princess Casamassima by Henry James

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay is a writer, editor, and teacher. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), was a Booksense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impact Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, it was published in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led The Center for Fiction’s popular Moby Dick reading group many times, as well as leading a long-standing Henry James group, among others. Early in her career, Sheridan was an editor at Simon & Schuster and worked at HarperCollins and Penguin Books in New York and in Sydney, Australia where she was born. She is a partner in the literary development and management collaboration, Filmore Projects (www.filmoreprojects.com)

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops