Character and Story in The Golden Bowl

This paper discusses What Maisie Knew in three different contexts in relation to learning to read. First, it talks about the author’s experience of reading the novel, aged fourteen or fifteen—not understanding much, but piecing a reading together out of fragments, and feeling the novel’s complexity as a promise of complexity in real things. Next, it discusses teaching the novel to students, helping them build an understanding of its meaning from the bottom upwards, out of the detail of the text. Finally it explores the novel’s own preoccupation with a child’s learning to perceive meaning and value in the life around her.