A London Life

One of the masterworks of Henry James’s middle phase, the novella A London Life first appeared in serial form in Scribner’s Magazine in the summer of 1888. As the story opens, Laura Wing, a young American woman, is living with her sister Selina and brother-in-law Lionel Berrington at Mellows, the Berrington family estate outside London, where she has a front-row seat for marital discord and its baleful effects on the couple’s children. As Laura struggles to come to terms with her sister’s possible infidelity, and its ramifications for her own social standing, the scene moves to London, where James stages an unforgettable portrait of a marriage’s final dissolution. For literary critic Edward Wagenknecht, Laura Wing is one of James’s essential heroines: “there is no character is his books–not even Isabel Archer, not even Fleda Vetch–to whom James commits himself more unreservedly.”