The Princess Aline — A Closer Reading

A Voice That Shifts Between Irony and Earnestness

The narrative voice in The Princess Aline is not uniform. In the opening chapters, it leans toward detached irony: the description of Carlton’s international reputation is undercut by the aside that the French government bought his painting “at an absurdly small figure,” and the narrator compares Carlton’s self-regard to that of “the ugly duckling” marvelling at its own transformation. This ironic distance gives way, however, when Carlton’s infatuation takes hold. The prose becomes more interior, tracking his sleepless nights and rehearsed speeches. One passage has him confiding to Miss Morris that he fancies the princess has noticed him, and the narrator records his eagerness without mockery. The shift is subtle but noticeable: the same character who earlier measured a swim in terms of a fifty-dollar bet now quotes poetry—or rather, has it quoted at him. Miss Morris teases him with a line from Browning: “To-day the birthday of my life has come.” Carlton’s response—a frown and a complaint about seating arrangements—shows the voice oscillating between the worldly and the vulnerable.

Pacing Through Dialogue and Set Pieces

Davis controls the novel’s pace by alternating between extended dialogue scenes and compressed narrative summaries. The excerpted passage on the Hellespont is a good example: a leisurely conversation about Leander and Hero turns into a wager, then into a story about Carlton’s swim to meet an ocean liner. The dialogue is snappy, with characters finishing each other’s thoughts and trading jokes. The English captain’s “I’ll take you” and the American Secretary’s anecdote create a miniature scene that feels almost self-contained. By contrast, the narrator can compress time with a single sentence: “As Carlton came into the breakfast-room on the morning of the day he was to meet the Princess Aline at dinner.” That sentence bridges days in a few words, then drops the reader into another dialogue. This rhythm—tight exchanges followed by swift transitions—keeps the story moving without lingering on exposition.

Recurring Details: The Photograph and the Gaze

Two details recur across the excerpts: the photograph of the princess and the act of looking. The photograph is the catalyst—Carlton’s pursuit begins with an image, not a meeting. Later, he wonders if the princess has been looking his way, and Miss Morris dryly notes that “it is a sign you’re good to look at.” The novel repeatedly draws attention to who is watching whom, and to the gap between seeing and knowing. Carlton is a portrait-painter by trade, trained to observe faces, yet he misreads the princess’s glance as interest. The narrator does not correct him; instead, the reader is left to weigh Miss Morris’s skepticism against Carlton’s hope. This motif of the gaze—its power and its limits—runs through the text, from the initial photograph to the dinner scene that looms ahead. The excerpts do not reveal whether Carlton’s reading of the princess’s look is accurate, but the pattern suggests the novel will keep that question open.

Readers should attend to the way Davis uses minor characters—especially Miss Morris—to comment on the action. She serves as a foil to Carlton’s earnestness, puncturing his romantic speeches with practical observations. The excerpts do not show the princess herself speaking, so her character remains a blank; the novel’s interest may lie less in her than in the gap between Carlton’s fantasy and reality. Pay attention to how the narrator handles that gap: with irony, sympathy, or both.

There’s a particular melancholy in The Princess Aline—the way Morton chases a face until it loses its magic. That same quiet ache lingers in Fighting for fortune — Reading Notes, not for love, but for the illusions we build around money. I finished both feeling like I’d watched someone wake from a very lovely, very fragile dream.