The House in Paris was published by Gollancz in 1935. The novel’s tripartite structure (Present – Past – Present) is its defining formal achievement: in the first and third sections, two children — Leopold (nine) and Henrietta (eleven) — wait in a house in Paris. Leopold is waiting to meet his mother for the first time; Henrietta is in transit between England and the South of France. The house belongs to Mme Fisher, an invalid whose manipulation of the people around her is the novel’s connecting thread.
The middle section — “The Past” — reveals the story of Leopold’s conception: his mother Karen Michaelis, an upper-class Englishwoman engaged to a suitable man, had a brief, intense affair with Max Ebhart, a protégé of Mme Fisher’s. The affair produced Leopold. Max killed himself. Karen gave up the child to be raised by Max’s family.
Bowen’s structural gambit — showing the child waiting before revealing the story of how he came to exist — creates a peculiar kind of suspense: we know the outcome (Leopold exists) but not the emotional truth that produced it. The revelation of Karen’s passion — sudden, genuine, and immediately extinguished by social convention — gains force from being embedded between the two “present” sections where its consequences sit quietly waiting.
Collecting The House in Paris
First edition (Gollancz, London, 1935): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $400–$1,000
- Very good in jacket: $150–$400