“Will a wrong motive always do wrong?” Cynthia Ozick in the introduction to James’s Washington Square (Modern Library, 2002)

When I first read Washington Square decades ago, it seemed one of Henry James’s simpler books. Now I’ve changed my mind. The twist of the plot leaves the reader breathless.

In James’s fictional universe, fortune hunters and heiresses abound. In The Portrait of a Lady, wealthy Isabel Archer falls for sophisticated Gilbert Osmond, who is a sadist and a mercenary; in The Golden Bowl, an American father and daughter are duped, Maggie Verver by charming Prince Amerigo, and Adam Verver by Maggie’s friend, Charlotte Stant. But in Washington Square, James has a different take. What if the heiress is unattractive? Is beauty part of the dowry? Or does a plain woman deserve love, even if it is feigned love? Are all fortune hunters bad?

Refreshingly, James is neither too serious nor too light in his treatment of fortune hunter Morris Townsend’s wooing of Catherine Sloper. We feel Catherine’s joy and astonishment when he begins to visit her at the house at Washington Square: she has simply never been so amused in her life. And yet she has leaned in the direction of fun before him: she likes bright red fashionable dresses that no one in her circle wears.

So here we have it: money and love, or at least pretended love. But the real question is Catherine’s future happiness. Catherine wants to marry Morris, but she is wary of her father, Dr. Sloper, as she should be. Although it is against tradition, Catherine decides to smooth the way for Morris and inform her father of their engagement before the two men meet.

And here’s where the question of morality becomes complicated. Dr Sloper, a grouchy widower who despises his daughter because she is neither smart nor pretty, investigates Morris in order to prove he is a crook. In his interview with Morris’s sister, who is reluctant to reveal details, Dr. Sloper learns that Morris is penniless, unemployed, and squandered his fortune in Europe.

But what does this have to do with romance? What does this have to do with Catherine’s desire to marry? Yes, this is a romance: the romance of a lifetime for Catherine and experienced vicariously by her father’s widowed sister, Aunt Lavinia, who lives with them. Aunt Lavinia loves the drama: she sometimes meets Morris secretly. Catherine is more down-to-earth. She does not want to meet Morris out-of-doors. She wants the comfort of her own drawing room.

In some ways, this novel of manners is not quite Jamesian. It delves into the old New York of his friend Edith Wharton. Both writers were fascinated by the dynamics of courtship and marriage, but James usually traffics more heavily in the complexities of money, while Wharton specializes in intrigues that complicate or nix the marriage plot.

I can’t think of another Jamesian character remotely like Catherine Sloper, but I can see her as a character with a walk-in role in Wharton’s The House of Mirth or The Mother’s Recompense.

The question in the Jamesian universe, it seems, is whether fortune and love should marry. Washington Square attacks the question from a startlingly different point-of-view.