A Modern Instance — Key Ideas to Explore

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Authors: Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2005 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Marriage -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 160,570

Reading time 699 min

Text sections 18

A Modern Instance — Key Ideas to Explore can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 160,570 words, 11 hr 39 min estimated reading time, and 18 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 17.1 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Marriage -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #8203

Howells's novel traces a marriage's unraveling through jealousy, pride, and social pressure, using sharp dialogue and psychological detail rather than melodrama. The excerpts show a couple's volatile dynamic, with Bartley's sardonic humor masking cruelty and Marcia's possessive love fueling conflict.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg8203

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Howells was ready for the thorough-going novel, and he gave to readers such examples of art as _A Modern Instance_, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, and that most important of all his novels, _A Hazard of New Fortunes_. By the time this last novel was written, he had become thoroughly interested, not merely in the men, women, and children about him, but in that mysterious, complex order named by us society, with its roots matted together as in a swamp, and seeming to many to be sucking up maleficent, miasmatic vapors from the soil in which it was rooted. Like many another lover of his kind, he has sought to trace the evils of individual life to their source in this composite order, and to guess at the mode by which society shall right itself and drink up healthy and life-giving virtues from the soil.

But it must not be inferred that his novels and other literary work have been by any means exclusively concerned with the reconstruction of the social order. He has indeed experimented with this theme, but he has always had a sane interest in life as he sees it, and with the increasing scope of his observation he has drawn his figures from a larger world, which includes indeed the world in which he first began to find his characters and their action.

Not long after retiring from the _Atlantic_ he went to live in New York, and varied his American experience with frequent travels and continued residence in Europe. For a while he maintained a department in _Harper's Magazine_, where he gave expression to his views on literature and the dramatic art, and for a short period returned to the editorial life in conducting _The Cosmopolitan_; later he entered also the field of lecturing, and thus further extended the range of his observation. For many years, Mr. Howells was the writer of “Editor's Easy Chair” in Harper's Magazine. In 1909 he was made president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Howells's death occurred May 11, 1920.

This in fine is the most summary statement of his career in literature,--that he has been a keen and sympathetic observer of life, and has caught its character, not like a reporter going about with a kodak and snapping it aimlessly at any conspicuous object, but like an alert artist who goes back to his studio after a walk and sets down his comments on what he has seen in quick, accurate sketches, now and then resolving numberless undrawn sketches into some one comprehensive and beautiful picture.

THE SEQUENCE OF MR. HOWELLS'S BOOKS.

Mr. Howells is the author of nearly seventy books, from which the following are selected as best representing his work in various fields and at various periods.

Venetian Life. Travel and description. 1867.

Their Wedding Journey. Novel. 1871.

Italian Journeys. Travel and description. 1872.

Suburban Sketches. 1872.

Poems. 1873 and 1895.

A Chance Acquaintance. Novel. 1873.

A Foregone Conclusion. Novel. 1874.

A Counterfeit Presentment. Comedy. 1877.

The Lady of the Aroostook. Novel. 1879.

The Undiscovered Country. Novel. 1880.

A Fearful Responsibility, and Other Stories. 1881.

A Modern Instance. Novel. 1881.

The Rise of Silas Lapham. Novel. 1884.

Tuscan Cities. Travel and description. 1885.

April Hopes. Novel. 1887.

A Hazard of New Fortunes. Novel. 1889.

The Sleeping Car, and Other Farces. 1889.

A Boy's Town. Reminiscences. 1890.

Criticism and Fiction. Essays. 1891.

My Literary Passions. Essays. 1895.

Stops of Various Quills. Poems. 1895.

Literary Friends and Acquaintances. Reminiscences, 1900.

Heroines of Fiction. Criticism. 1901.

The Kentons. Novel. 1902.

Literature and Life. Criticism. 1902.

London Films. Travel and Description. 1905.

The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains. They were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward, tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered a vast acreage with the lines of their intense, coarse green; the meadows were deep with English grass to the banks of the river, that, doubling and returning upon itself, still marked its way with a dense fringe of alders and white birches.

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From its opening chapters, A Modern Instance establishes a marriage under strain not through grand catastrophes but through the accumulation of small, revealing exchanges. The excerpts capture a pivotal evening after a party: Bartley returns elated by social success, while Marcia seethes with jealousy over his attention to another woman. Their reconciliation—Bartley's forced patience, Marcia's penitent tears—is undercut by his mocking humor and her lingering suspicion. Howells builds tension through dialogue that veers between affection and resentment, suggesting a bond sustained by habit and desire rather than trust.

Jealousy as a Structural Force

The excerpts foreground jealousy not as a passing emotion but as a recurring pattern that shapes the couple's interactions. Marcia's reaction to Bartley's evening at Miss Kingsbury's—slamming doors, refusing to talk, then melting into tears—reveals a cycle of accusation and reconciliation. Howells renders this with psychological precision: Marcia's jealousy is both possessive and self-aware, as when she moans, “Oh, I'm not myself at all, any more!” Bartley, in turn, responds with a mixture of anger and condescension, choosing to “follow her up-stairs with a slow, dogged step” rather than escalate. The narrative does not judge either character but instead tracks the emotional cost of these repeated ruptures.

Social Performance and Private Tension

Howells contrasts the public face of the couple with their private discord. At the party, Bartley is “flattered by the attention specially paid him,” while Marcia observes his interactions with a “look” that frightens Clara Kingsbury. The social setting—a gathering where guests are “famished” for lack of substantial food—becomes a stage for class and status anxieties. Bartley's later mockery of the “elderly aristocrat” and the “mean little slices of bread and butter” reveals his resentment of the social world he seeks to conquer. Marcia's jealousy is partly a response to this world: she fears losing Bartley to its allure. The novel thus intertwines marital conflict with broader questions of ambition and belonging.

Howells's Narrative Voice and Dialogue

The excerpts showcase Howells's characteristic use of dialogue to convey subtext. Bartley's sardonic remarks—calling his own hunger “very improper—for me”—are layered with irony that Marcia misses but the reader perceives. The narrator's commentary is spare but pointed: “Marcia was not in the state in which woman best convinces her enemies of her fitness for empire.” Such observations align with Howells's realism, avoiding melodrama in favor of understated judgment. The prose is precise, with verbs like “pushed in,” “crash of unmistakable significance,” and “slow, dogged step” carrying emotional weight. This technique invites readers to infer the characters' inner lives from their actions and words.

Readers approaching A Modern Instance should attend to the rhythm of its scenes: Howells builds tension through everyday rituals—returning home, sharing a meal, saying goodnight—that become charged with unspoken conflict. The novel rewards attention to its dialogue, where what is left unsaid often matters as much as the words exchanged. The catalog subject “Marriage -- Fiction” accurately signals the core concern, but the excerpts suggest a more specific focus on the psychology of a mismatched couple rather than a general treatise on matrimony.

Reading how Bartley’s sharp tongue slowly hollows out Marcia’s trust, it’s hard not to think about quieter catastrophes—the kind that don't shout in dialogue but settle into the spaces between generations. That same patient, sorrowful accrual figures in Mary Anerley: A Yorkshire Tale — A Closer Reading, where the drama lingers in burdens carried alone. Some novels simply leave you with a heavy, wondering sigh.