Henry James's 'Brooksmith': Devotion and Its Discontents

This article situates Henry James's 1891 short story "Brooksmith" among the practices and insights of work on James that has grown out of queer theory. In so doing it focuses on the role of devotion both in the story and in the collection of which it originally formed a part. It argues for a number of conceptual linkages between devotion and the queer, and further situates the story in traditions of writing, some dating back to the eighteenth century, that explore different senses of devotion as passionate adherence, readerly failing, and fatedness to destruction.