He was attacked by critics in both New York and Boston (“the clucking of a brood of prairie hens,” he called them), including his friend William Dean Howells, whose tone was milder but whose opinion was pointed. Howells wrote: “We foresee, without any powerful prophetic lens, that Mr. James will be in some quarters promptly attainted of high treason.” On the accusation that Hawthorne was provincial, Howells wrote: “If it is not provincial for an Englishman to be English, or a Frenchman French, then it is not so for an American to be American; and if Hawthorne was ‘exquisitely provincial’ one had better take one’s chances of universality with him than with any Londoner or Parisian of his time.” He sent James his review.

James was unrepentant. He replied:

I think it is extremely provincial for a Russian to be very Russian, a Portuguese very Portuguese; for the simple reason that certain national types are essentially and intrinsically provincial. I sympathise even less with your protest against the idea that it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion—a proposition that seems to me to be so true as to be a truism.

In that same letter James mentioned a forthcoming serialization in the Cornhill Magazine of “a poorish story in three numbers—a tale purely American, the writing of which made me feel acutely the want of the ‘paraphernalia.’”

The paraphernalia in question were, James had written earlier in the letter, the “manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured and established that a novelist lives—they are the very stuff his work is made of.” The “poorish story” was “Washington Square.” While it is clear that he was being modest when he mentioned the book to Howells (and his general tendency in referring to his own work was to be self-deprecating), it still must seem that he underestimated the book. It is certainly his best short novel, and remains one of his best books. It was the first of his books to be serialized simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, thus offering him the freedom to devote a great deal of time to The Portrait of a Lady, his next project.

“Washington Square” tells the story or Dr. Sloper and his only daughter, Catherine, whom he considers dull. When Catherine falls in love with a penniless young man, her father becomes determined, in ways which are cold and cruel, that his daughter must not marry the interloper. James’s portrait of the vulnerable and sensitive and unassertive daughter is one of the most sustained and convincing of his career. The value of “Washington Square” also lies in the lack of “paraphernalia,” thus forcing James to intensify the psychology, to draw the father and daughter with greater subtlety and care because he, at the apex of his social power in London, did not know enough about the city and the society in which he had set the novel. He knew about the interior of the houses where he had been a small boy; he could write about familiar rooms; but he had not grown up in that world enough to know its wider personality.

He placed the events of “Washington Square” in the very years when he and his family were living in the city; he made his grandmother’s house become the house of Dr. Sloper, as a year later he would make his other grandmother’s house become Isabel Archer’s house in Albany. The original story was told to him by Fanny Kemble, whose brother had jilted an heiress when he discovered that her father intended to disinherit her. James moved this story to his own lost territory, to the site which belonged now merely to his dreams, to the old New York, whose contours he had barely made out before he was removed from it. In chapter two of the book he inserted a passage about Washington Square and its environs which strikes the reader as strange, almost clumsy, and unthinkable for a novelist who is about to write The Portrait of a Lady.

“I know not,” he wrote of the area around the square,

whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history... It was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step... It was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.

This may well be the excuse, but it is hardly the reason. The reason is that, a quarter of a century after it had been lost to him, James was prepared to disrupt the sacred seamlessness of his fiction to evoke this square as belonging to his memory, his primary sense of himself which could be brought back now only in words. The need was so pressing and urgent that he would allow such a paragraph to remain; had it been about another place, he would surely have removed it. He was claiming Washington Square for himself. It was here also, soon afterwards, that he began to evoke the next generation, who were too ready to eschew social history for the blight, as James saw it, of newness.

Dr. Sloper’s niece, for example, is about to marry Arthur Townsend, who speaks about his new house:

It’s only for three or four years. At the end of three or four years we’ll move. That’s the way to live in New York—to move every three or four years. Then you always get the last thing. It’s because the city’s growing so quick—you’ve got to keep up with it. It’s going straight up town—that’s where New York’s going...I guess we’ll move up little by little; when we get tired of one street we’ll go higher.