Abstract

From 1897 onwards, because of a wrist injury, Henry James dictated most of his fiction to a secretary at a typewriter. One of his first dictated texts was In the Cage (1898), the story of a telegraph girl, whose attempts to communicate are also mechanized by the electrically powered telegraphic 'sounder.' This paper explores the telegraphist's awareness of the highly coded noises, signs and silences around her. It also traces the echoes of the Remington typewriter and James's dictating voice within the text. It argues that James's richly ambiguous late style is best understood as a style based on sound.

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