A Donnée Declined: Lady Gregory and Henry James's Notebooks

A Donnée Declined: Lady Gregory and Henry James's Notebooks By Thomas Allain-Chapman, King's College, University of London The status of Henry James's notebooks as an invaluable source of insight into James's creative process has been for some time beyond question. To trace the development between donnée and finished work is an essential task for the critic of works such as What Maisie Knew or The Spoils of Poynton, both of which received extensive—or, as it seemed to James, "interminable"—attention in the notebooks between 1895 and 1896.1 Such detailed and prolonged wrestling with material was, however, the exception rather than the rule. Most of the entries appear to have been made during the preliminary stages of composition, often at the moment of initial inspiration. The inspiration was not always entirely James's own—several entries concerning projected works cite a friend or colleague as the source of a plot idea. Edward White Benson's ghost-story became The Turn of the Screw; Paul Bourget provided the basic plot for "A London Life"; and "The Real Thing" grew from an anecdote related by George Du Maurier. Not all the suggestions of his friends, however, came to fruition in James's writings. In 1889, Du Maurier offered James another plot that he declined, but urged Du Maurier himself to develop. The story of "the servant girl with a wonderful rich voice but no musical genius who is mesmerized and made to sing by a little foreign Jew" became, five years later, Du Maurier's best-selling novel, Trilby (CN 51).2 This occurrence prompts a question: Were other données detailed in the notebooks eventually used as the basis for fictions by those who had originally offered them to James? The fame of Trilby guaranteed that its The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 121-26. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 122 The Henry James Review origins would be investigated and the connection with the notebooks established. The obscurity of the work I wish to discuss here has, conversely, ensured that no mention of its connection with James is made in editions of his notebooks, or indeed elsewhere in critical or biographical studies. On 23 January 1894, James made a note of a little less than one thousand words in length that detailed a plot given to him "some time since by Lady Gregory" (CN 84). Isabella Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) was to achieve literary fame as a playwright, poet, and close associate of W. B. Yeats in the revival of Irish theater, but at this point her literary career was in its infancy. Her friendship with Henry James had begun soon after her marriage to Sir William Gregory in 1880, and the two were subsequently drawn together by their shared concern for the young Paul Harvey, orphaned nephew of their mutual friend, Mrs. Blanche Childe. In a letter thanking her for the present of a wastepaper basket made from an elephant's foot, James remarks on her kindness to the young man: "Oddly enough (in a sense), I was relating only late last night how kind you have been to P[aul] H[arvey] (relating it to my good hosts—old friends here), and the first thing this A.M. your letter comes. I hope P. H. continues to deserve well of you and that Sir William returned in due course and in due condition" (HJL 291).3 Lady Gregory described James as "one of my Sunday visitors" (Seventy Years 182), and the entry in the notebooks for 23 January 1894 indicates that their conversation encompassed literary as well as personal matters. This entry details the story of an Irish squire's wife who leaves her husband and two small daughters to follow her lover, but returns to her husband after a brief but scandalous absence. The husband takes her back, but only as the supervisor of his children and his household, and only until such time as the girls grow up: "He has fixed a particular date, a particular year, and they have lived de part et d'autre, with her eyes upon this dreadful day. The two girls alone have...