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A Foregone Conclusion
The first tenderness of spring was in the air though down in that calle there was yet enough of the wintry rawness to chill the tip of Don Ippolito’s sensitive nose, which he rubbed for comfort with a handkerchief of dark blue calico, and polished for ornament with a handkerchief of white linen.
170 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1875
2 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
William Dean Howells
1,192 books101 followersWillam Dean Howells (1837-1920) was a novelist, short story writer, magazine editor, and mentor who wrote for various magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine.
In January 1866 James Fields offered him the assistant editor role at the Atlantic Monthly. Howells accepted after successfully negotiating for a higher salary, but was frustrated by Fields's close supervision. Howells was made editor in 1871, remaining in the position until 1881.
In 1869 he first met Mark Twain, which began a longtime friendship. Even more important for the development of his literary style — his advocacy of Realism — was his relationship with the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison, who during the 1870s wrote a series of articles for the Atlantic Monthly on the lives of ordinary Americans.
He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1872, but his literary reputation took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which described the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur of the paint business. His social views were also strongly represented in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and An Imperative Duty (1892). He was particularly outraged by the trials resulting from the Haymarket Riot.
His poems were collected during 1873 and 1886, and a volume under the title Stops of Various Quills was published during 1895. He was the initiator of the school of American realists who derived, through the Russians, from Balzac and had little sympathy with any other type of fiction, although he frequently encouraged new writers in whom he discovered new ideas.
Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Benito Pérez Galdós, and, especially, Leo Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of American writers Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Abraham Cahan, Madison Cawein,and Frank Norris. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence. In his "Editor's Study" column at the Atlantic Monthly and, later, at Harper's, he formulated and disseminated his theories of "realism" in literature.
In 1904 he was one of the first seven people chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became president.
Howells died in Manhattan on May 11, 1920. He was buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts.
Noting the "documentary" and truthful value of Howells' work, Henry James wrote: "Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree documentary."
In January 1866 James Fields offered him the assistant editor role at the Atlantic Monthly. Howells accepted after successfully negotiating for a higher salary, but was frustrated by Fields's close supervision. Howells was made editor in 1871, remaining in the position until 1881.
In 1869 he first met Mark Twain, which began a longtime friendship. Even more important for the development of his literary style — his advocacy of Realism — was his relationship with the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison, who during the 1870s wrote a series of articles for the Atlantic Monthly on the lives of ordinary Americans.
He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1872, but his literary reputation took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which described the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur of the paint business. His social views were also strongly represented in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and An Imperative Duty (1892). He was particularly outraged by the trials resulting from the Haymarket Riot.
His poems were collected during 1873 and 1886, and a volume under the title Stops of Various Quills was published during 1895. He was the initiator of the school of American realists who derived, through the Russians, from Balzac and had little sympathy with any other type of fiction, although he frequently encouraged new writers in whom he discovered new ideas.
Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Benito Pérez Galdós, and, especially, Leo Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of American writers Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Abraham Cahan, Madison Cawein,and Frank Norris. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence. In his "Editor's Study" column at the Atlantic Monthly and, later, at Harper's, he formulated and disseminated his theories of "realism" in literature.
In 1904 he was one of the first seven people chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became president.
Howells died in Manhattan on May 11, 1920. He was buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts.
Noting the "documentary" and truthful value of Howells' work, Henry James wrote: "Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree documentary."
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 25, 2009
William Dean Howells argued that American fiction should do more than entertain; novels should deal with the issues of their day, just as newspapers do, and strive to educate and enlighten their readers. His first novel, A Foregone Conclusion, finds him beginning to work toward that ideal, but the love story still comes out on top, unlike in his later novels (most famously The Rise of Silas Lapham) where he gives his readers the romantic interest that they demand but without allowing it to dominate the proceedings. A Foregone Conlusion does deal some with issues of religious faith, but in the end the novel is too thin.
January 12, 2013
Although this short novel is handled adequately by Howells, there is still a certain amount of clumsiness to the plotting and characterization. It's clear Howells was attempting to form a more realistic and psychological representation of human interactions, but this work falls a bit too easily into sentimentality, cliche, and other dangers of the artistic professions (not the least of these other elements being the ubiquity of coincidence, used as a means to move the plot). Having said all that, this novel would be an interesting object for critical analysis. Howells has been out of the literary canon for around thirty years (in other words, right before the theoretical advances in literary criticism that would have given critics some different tools to analyze his works). This novel is full of supposedly impermeable boundaries (between men and women, white Americans and other ethnicities/nationalities, Protestantism and Catholicism, as well as actual borders between nations). Yet Howells's portrayal of these boundaries demonstrates his apparent understanding that they are not as firm and impermeable as they might seem. In other words, border crossings, exchanges, ambivalence, and other forms of liminal transfers are the rule, not the norm, in this novel. This makes this book more interesting than its surface artistic merits seem to warrant.
October 22, 2020
I knew nothing of Howells when I began A Foregone Conclusion, other than that his best-known novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham. I’ve subsequently read some background, enough to know that Howells’ influence was greatest as a critic, as an advocate for particular authors that he admired (Zola, Tolstoy, Dunbar, Crane, Norris, et al.) and for their use of a realistic style. After reading A Foregone Conclusion and noting Howells’ endorsement of realism, I began to wonder what specific novels and novelists exemplified the false or distorted/idealized representation of things that he was reacting to…?
In a Wikipedia citation about Howells’ novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (which I’m currently reading), its author writes: “Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel. The resolution of the love triangle of Irene Lapham, Tom Corey, and Penelope Lapham highlights Howells' rejection of the conventions of sentimental romantic novels as unrealistic and deceitful. An excerpt of the text was used in the 2019 AP English Literature and Composition Exam as a short answer question.”
In another Wikipedia article, Howells speaks of his advocacy of realism: “I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always ‘has the standard of the arts in his power,' will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not ‘simple, natural, and honest,' because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.”
As a representative statement of Howells’ critical/aesthetic thinking, I find the grasshopper citation a bit of a head-scratcher. There aren’t many who think of ideal or sentimental or heroic grasshoppers—unless it’s a case of Disney-fication and anthropomorphism—and I again wonder, just which specific fiction/novel is Howells reacting to…?
With all the foregoing in mind, knowing that Howells’ was reacting to sentimental and falsely melodramatic depictions of relations, I wondered at the completion of A Foregone Conclusion how it still seemed to me, if not a romantic representation of facts, a somewhat stilted depiction of events that by the very nature of social conventions made it seem “old fashioned” and romantic, in a wistful, almost nostalgic fashion. And yet it occurs to me that the hint of a rueful wistfulness is akin to the endings found in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. In each of these novels, there is a hard-headed dismissal of events that have shaped the present moment, but there is also intimation of the heart’s inability to accede completely to the facts.
I enjoyed A Foregone Conclusion, though I had to consciously filter my perceptions. Howells’ thoroughgoing, faithful depiction of the social constraints placed on the characters due to habit and convention made them all seem old fashioned, which from our differently-conventional, contemporary point of view is almost itself a romantic/fictional mode of being. So, while Howells is exercising documentary fidelity, contemporary readers are perceiving authorial flourishes that appear to romanticize because of the evocation of “costume drama” conventions.
The novel’s denouement—a semi-elegiac consideration of the events and the lives and time lost that led to the “foregone conclusion” of the marriage of Henry Ferris and Florida Verlain—is an attempt to both consider the romantic/melodramatic aspects of their affaire de coeur and to dismiss them. This appeal to a rational summation does not fly, and if nothing else, Howells makes clear that even a “realistic” treatment of affairs of the heart can’t shake entirely the tropes that evoke romantic idealization.
In a Wikipedia citation about Howells’ novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (which I’m currently reading), its author writes: “Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel. The resolution of the love triangle of Irene Lapham, Tom Corey, and Penelope Lapham highlights Howells' rejection of the conventions of sentimental romantic novels as unrealistic and deceitful. An excerpt of the text was used in the 2019 AP English Literature and Composition Exam as a short answer question.”
In another Wikipedia article, Howells speaks of his advocacy of realism: “I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always ‘has the standard of the arts in his power,' will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not ‘simple, natural, and honest,' because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.”
As a representative statement of Howells’ critical/aesthetic thinking, I find the grasshopper citation a bit of a head-scratcher. There aren’t many who think of ideal or sentimental or heroic grasshoppers—unless it’s a case of Disney-fication and anthropomorphism—and I again wonder, just which specific fiction/novel is Howells reacting to…?
With all the foregoing in mind, knowing that Howells’ was reacting to sentimental and falsely melodramatic depictions of relations, I wondered at the completion of A Foregone Conclusion how it still seemed to me, if not a romantic representation of facts, a somewhat stilted depiction of events that by the very nature of social conventions made it seem “old fashioned” and romantic, in a wistful, almost nostalgic fashion. And yet it occurs to me that the hint of a rueful wistfulness is akin to the endings found in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. In each of these novels, there is a hard-headed dismissal of events that have shaped the present moment, but there is also intimation of the heart’s inability to accede completely to the facts.
I enjoyed A Foregone Conclusion, though I had to consciously filter my perceptions. Howells’ thoroughgoing, faithful depiction of the social constraints placed on the characters due to habit and convention made them all seem old fashioned, which from our differently-conventional, contemporary point of view is almost itself a romantic/fictional mode of being. So, while Howells is exercising documentary fidelity, contemporary readers are perceiving authorial flourishes that appear to romanticize because of the evocation of “costume drama” conventions.
The novel’s denouement—a semi-elegiac consideration of the events and the lives and time lost that led to the “foregone conclusion” of the marriage of Henry Ferris and Florida Verlain—is an attempt to both consider the romantic/melodramatic aspects of their affaire de coeur and to dismiss them. This appeal to a rational summation does not fly, and if nothing else, Howells makes clear that even a “realistic” treatment of affairs of the heart can’t shake entirely the tropes that evoke romantic idealization.
April 19, 2020
William Dean Howells, although not widely read today, was one of the foremost American novelists in the generation after the Civil War. "A Foregone Conclusion" (1875) is set in Venice in the early 1860s, after the declaration of the Kingdom of Italy, but before the new country acquired Venice from Austria. The major characters are a Venetian priest (Don Ippolito), the American consul (a young painter named Henry Ferris), and two American women temporarily living in Venice (the Vervains, mother and daughter).
Don Ippolito doubts his vocation, and he dreams of going to America and making a living as an inventor. He becomes acquainted with Ferris, who introduces him to the Vervains as a potential tutor of the Italian language for Miss Vervain (aged 17). The two men's developing relationship with the Vervains culminates in a crisis and the death of one of the characters. Along the way, Howells deals with nationalism, spiritual doubt, and aesthetics.
Don Ippolito doubts his vocation, and he dreams of going to America and making a living as an inventor. He becomes acquainted with Ferris, who introduces him to the Vervains as a potential tutor of the Italian language for Miss Vervain (aged 17). The two men's developing relationship with the Vervains culminates in a crisis and the death of one of the characters. Along the way, Howells deals with nationalism, spiritual doubt, and aesthetics.
December 3, 2021
This was my first novel by William Dean Howells. I came across his name as contemporary of Mark Twain and for some reason found myself wanting to read something by him. "A Forgone Conclusion" is a basic romance, so basic I was constantly surprised at how interested I found it. I could foresee the outcome - really ALL the outcomes of ALL the characters - from the first few pages and yet, I really enjoyed this! It just goes to show the power of great writing! Culturally, some things were over my head. Several conversations would happen between the male/female characters which I would read with interest but then be confused when the author end the scene with the characters angry/sad/uncomfortable with each other and I would be thinking, "Wait! what happened? What did I miss?" After a few instances, I was able to accept that I would not understand this and allow the scenes to happen. This novel is short and sweet and easy.
February 1, 2018
I didn't much like the setting, I didn't think any of the characters came alive, and as usual with this author, the end fell flat. Not recommended.
September 30, 2020
(My ranking of Howells' best novels: https://azleslie.com/posts/howells-ra...)
One part travel writing, one part realism, one part melodrama. The exploration of the relationship between the real and the romanticized that would come to distinguish some of Howells' better known early works like Silas Lapham is already here, and dealing with tourism plays into this conceptual dynamic very well. Like Silas Lapham, A Foregone Conclusion still relies on some weak plotting and melodramatic flourishes. The scope is rather thin even for how brief it is, but this is balanced by the novel's brevity. What tips the scale for me from 3 to 2 is that Howells hasn't yet gotten his stylistic footing at the sentence level.
One part travel writing, one part realism, one part melodrama. The exploration of the relationship between the real and the romanticized that would come to distinguish some of Howells' better known early works like Silas Lapham is already here, and dealing with tourism plays into this conceptual dynamic very well. Like Silas Lapham, A Foregone Conclusion still relies on some weak plotting and melodramatic flourishes. The scope is rather thin even for how brief it is, but this is balanced by the novel's brevity. What tips the scale for me from 3 to 2 is that Howells hasn't yet gotten his stylistic footing at the sentence level.
July 7, 2009
This is tricky. I usually keep up with my reviews by writing them when I return the books to the library. Since this book was a book I own a copy of, I've kind of lost track. At some points I felt like I didn't have enough inherent knowledge about the setting (the time, the place) to even be reading the book. None of the characters won me over, so I'm not sure how much I really cared what happened to them. I didn't feel the passion that was talked about. The whole story felt very distant and removed from me.
October 4, 2011
Since you know what will happen in this book, it is a foregone conclusion, what's to recommend it? I enjoyed the writing and the characterization. It is good to read a book that is nuanced and well written. I look forward to reading more by Howell.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews