Louisa Pallant

Written during Henry James's residence in Florence in 1887, "Louisa Pallant" was first published in 1888. Like most of his short stories, it has a first-person narrator who plays a significant, and far from omniscient part, in the action. James summarized the outline of the story in his Florence notebooks: The idea of a worldly mother and a worldly daughter, the latter of whom has been trained up so perfectly by the former that she excels and surpasses her, and the mother, who has some principle of goodness still left in her composition, is appalled at her own work. She sees the daughter, so hard, so cruelly ambitious, so bent on making a great marriage and a great success at any price, that she is almost afraid of her.