In the Cage

 Recently I was in The Bookshop, that small but lovingly curated second-hand bookshop in Wirksworth. This was my first visit in a while, but I knew I was unlikely to leave empty-handed. And so it proved: when I spotted Henry James's In the Cage on the shelves – one I had never read and only vaguely heard of – I had to have it, especially as it was a Hesperus Press paperback, one of a series of beautifully produced reprints of neglected short works by great writers (I have Chekhov's The Story of a Nobody in the same series). 
  In the Cage tells the story of a young woman who works in 'the cage' of a post office telegram counter in a Mayfair grocer's shop. She is engaged to a dull former colleague who is set on advancing himself in the world, but her heart is elsewhere, quickened by the high-life romances she glimpses in the telegrams she handles. In particular, she feels some kind of relationship growing between her and one Captain Everard, a handsome young man about town who is one of her most frequent customers. The quotation on the back jacket of the Hesperus edition relates to this, and is taken from the one real conversation the pair ever have: 
'"I've known perfectly well that you knew I took trouble for you; and that you knew I took trouble for you; and that knowledge has been for me, and I seemed to see it was for you, as if there was something – I don't know what to call it! – between us."'
Which doesn't sound much like a telegraph girl but very much like Henry James. And if the dialogue is unmistakably Jamesian, so, happily, is the psychological penetration of his empathetic portrait of the girl, so are the endless subtleties and nuances of expression, and so is the clever way in which James manages to bring this outwardly slight tale – more like a long short story than a short novel – to a satisfying, and unpredictable, dénouement. Published in the same year as The Turn of the Screw (1898), In the Cage is a more straightforwards work, and very different, but in terms of quality I would say it is not far behind. I am glad I found it.