Julia Bride

Henry James's story Julia Bride appeared in Harper's magazine in 1908. The similarity to Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, published three years earlier, is obvious, like the circumstances facing Wharton’s heroine Lily Bart and James’s Julia Bride. Julia Bride is being courted by Basil French, the son of a wealthy but very traditional New York family. He wants to know more about her background, but she is reluctant to let him know that she has been engaged six times, and that her mother has been divorced twice and is likely heading for a third one. Julia is caught between America’s class mobility, social fluidity and personal freedoms, and the rigid ethics, snobbery, and social codes that the east coast elite had imported from Europe.

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