What Maisie Knew

Maisie's parents, whose fecklessness challenges credulity, have divorced each other, then each abandoned their second spouses, then quit the stage entirely, leaving Maisie with two stepparents and a nanny in conflict, as all three of them seem desperately to want to keep and raise the orphan. Maisie, who has had virtually no education and spent almost no time with other children, is the narrator's great challenge, written as blankly innocent but with adult speech patterns and a hyper-attentive shrewdness. Lorna Raver makes her human. Her adults are even better, vivid and self-revealing, and outmaneuvered by Maisie. Raver's English accents are not perfect, but this distracts little from the pleasure of her performance, which is filled with intelligent empathy and human warmth for these unlikely characters. B.G. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

November 26, 2012
Young Maisie Farange finds herself the unwitting pawn in her parents’ divorce, as her mother and father use her as a tool for personal attacks. As both parents find new romantic partners, Maisie, who is mature beyond her age, is thrust even further into an adult world of betrayal and sexual gamesmanship. In this audio edition, Maureen O’Brien delivers a standout performance of James’s classic novella. Even for audiences who might not enjoy James’s prose, O’Brien’s narration is both gripping and suitably melancholy. She captures the boiling anger of the adult world, as well as Maisie’s sadness and confusion. Maisie’s relationship with her governess Mrs. Wix, the sole point of emotional consistency in the young girl’s life, is particularly poignant, thanks to O’Brien’s reading. Though there’s relatively little dialogue in James’s work—most of the action takes place through narration, filtered through Maisie’s point of view—O’Brien excels at creating unique personalities for the different characters. Her Maisie, in particular, sounds like a child—intelligent but also extremely vulnerable.