SOURCE: Tintner, Adeline R. “James's ‘The Patagonia’: A Critique of Trollope's ‘The Journey of Panama.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 1 (winter 1995): 59-67.

In the following essay, Tintner treats Henry James's short story “The Patagonia” as an attempt to improve the characterization and plot of English realist Anthony Trollope's story “The Journey to Panama.”

Five years before Henry James wrote “The Patagonia” (1888), James published his long essay on Trollope in which he noted that, although many of Trollope's short stories were “charming,” the presentation of his “British maiden” had not “a touch of the morbid.” James concluded that Trollope had “a wholesome mistrust of morbid analysis” (Partial Portraits 102). It is this deficiency, as James considered it, that he “corrected” in his version of Trollope's “The Journey to Panama” (1861). By introducing the actual suicide of James's heroine, Grace Mavis, presented as a “mysterious tragic act” (“Patagonia” 347), with all its unsaid...