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Closed Eyes

Anita Brookner used epigraphs sparingly - in Family and Friends (Goethe), A Closed Eye (James) and Strangers (Freud).

The epigraph of her 1991 novel A Closed Eye is a quote from an early Henry James tale called Madame de Mauves (1874).*

I have two questions: Which text did Brookner use, and where did she find it?

With James, there is often a question of texts. James (unlike Brookner) was an inveterate reviser. He would make minor changes to works between magazine and book publication. And years later, for the New York Edition (1907-9), he reread and substantially revised most of his oeuvre, making significant alterations at the level of the word and sentence to early works like Madame de Mauves.

Brookner quotes from the original 1874 version:

She strikes me as a person who is begging off from full knowledge, - who has struck a truce with painful truth, and is trying awhile the experiment of living with closed eyes.

The New York Edition version (Volume 13) reads:

She strikes me as a person who’s begging off from full knowledge - who has patched up a peace with some painful truth and is trying a while the experiment of living with closed eyes.

['who's' ... 'patched up a peace' ... 'some painful truth' ... 'a while': minor, subtle changes. Which is better? A matter of taste. Perhaps see my reading of The Princess Casamassima for more of this (here).]

I suggest Brookner read Madame de Mauves in a Penguin collection published in 1990,** which made widely available for the first time eight of James earliest short stories. The edition, edited by Roger Gard, favoured the first-edition texts.

* Brookner italicises the title - correctly, I think for a text just beyond the 30,000-word mark.

** I reckon John Bayley also had the book. He makes substantial use of 'A Landscape-Painter' in his review of Brookner's Fraud in 1992 (here).

***

The question of what Brookner does with James's metaphor is possibly more interesting. She appears to mean to apply it to the heroine of her novel, Harriet. Harriet is the closed eye. Or have I misread? Brookner also utilises the archaic convention in English where 'eye' refers either to one or both of a person's eyes, as in the Ancient Mariner and his long grey beard and glittering eye.














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