The House in Paris

Summary

The novel opens in Paris early in the morning as eleven-year-old Henrietta Mountjoy, accompanied by Miss Naomi Fisher, travels by taxi to the house of Naomi's mother, Mme Fisher, an elderly and sickly woman who has taken in well-off girls for a season. Henrietta is en route to Menton to spend time with her grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Mme Fisher tells Henrietta she will spend the day with Leopold, a nine-year-old boy who is to meet his mother there for the first time; Miss Fisher asks Henrietta to be considerate with Leopold and to ask him nothing.

After breakfast and a nap in the salon, Henrietta awakens to find Leopold before her. The two children talk: Leopold explains Mme Fisher's illness and his anticipation of his mother's arrival; Henrietta reveals her mother is dead. Though Leopold angers Henrietta by spilling her handbag's contents, they develop a rapport. Miss Fisher leads Henrietta to Mme Fisher's room.

While they are upstairs, Leopold rummages through Miss Fisher's handbag, discovering three envelopes. He disregards a letter about Henrietta. The second envelope, with a Berlin postmark, is from his mother but empty, and he feels Miss Fisher has done him down. The third envelope contains a letter from his adoptive mother, Marian Grant Moody, discussing Leopold's delicate constitution and noting he has not had sex education yet.

Leopold returns to the first envelope, written by Henrietta's grandmother to Miss Fisher, addressing her as Miss Kingfisher and informing her that Henrietta is to spend the winter in the south of France, staying only a day in Paris.

Themes

In The House in Paris, time folds in on itself, with the novel’s central section, "The Past," functioning as a constructed memory. Characters from earlier moments already anticipate those who will come later; just hours after Leopold is conceived, Karen imagines him as though he is already real. This thought later becomes Leopold’s own, as he pieces together his history from scattered clues and impressions gathered during his stay in the Paris house.

Bowen, in a 1951 essay, described this as “factitious memory”—a way for art to make us feel we remember things we never actually experienced. Movement, both physical and emotional, stalls throughout the book. Marian Kelly notes that the narrative structure deliberately halts progress: the backward-moving middle section creates a stasis that breaks the story’s forward drive. Karen once loved Max hopelessly for years, but when they finally came together, the relationship failed to satisfy her, and she remained bound to her social class.

In the later timeline, Mme Fisher postpones selling her Paris house until her death, even though she has been waiting to die for almost ten years. Leopold’s growth is deliberately held back by his adoptive family, who keep him dependent. Both Leopold and Henrietta spend the entire novel in transit, never reaching their intended destinations. Karen repeatedly delays her long-awaited reunions with Leopold and Naomi, while Henrietta’s grandmother, in a letter to Naomi, complains that she has been waiting for a visit.

Did You Know?

• The novel was first published in 1935 by Victor Gollancz, who wrote to Bowen, 'I wonder if you realize how un-English it is?'
• Bowen's writing style frequently involves a slow pace that builds to a climax, and a usage of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness.
• The tri-partite structure and the ten-year gap between past and present had been used earlier in Friends and Relations.