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Henry James

December 02, 2023

For other people named Henry James, see Henry James (disambiguation).

Henry James OM ((1843-04-15)15 April 1843 – (1916-02-28)28 February 1916) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

Henry James

OM
James in 1913
Born(1843-04-15)15 April 1843
New York City, U.S.
Died28 February 1916(1916-02-28) (aged 72)
Chelsea, London, England
OccupationWriter
CitizenshipAmerican (1843–1915)
British (1915–1916)
Alma materHarvard Law School
Period1863–1916
Notable worksThe American (1877)
Daisy Miller (1879)
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
RelativesHenry James Sr. (father)
William James (brother)
Alice James (sister)
Signature

He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting.[1]

His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".

James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916.[2] Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."[3]

Life edit

Early years, 1843–1883 edit

 
Henry James, age 11, with his father, Henry James Sr. – 1854 daguerreotype by Mathew Brady

James was born at 21 Washington Place in New York City on 15 April 1843. His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr. His father was intelligent and steadfastly congenial. He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent means from his father, an Albany banker and investor. Mary came from a wealthy family long settled in New York City. Her sister Katherine lived with her adult family for an extended period of time. Henry Jr. was one of four boys, the others being William, who was one year his senior, and younger brothers Wilkinson (Wilkie) and Robertson. His younger sister was Alice. Both of his parents were of Irish and Scottish descent.[4]

Before he was a year old, his father sold the house at Washington Place and took the family to Europe, where they lived for a time in a cottage in Windsor Great Park in England. The family returned to New York in 1845, and Henry spent much of his childhood living between his paternal grandmother's home in Albany, and a house on 14th Street in Manhattan.[5] His education was calculated by his father to expose him to many influences, primarily scientific and philosophical; it was described by Percy Lubbock, the editor of his selected letters, as "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous."[6] James did not share the usual education in Latin and Greek classics. Between 1855 and 1860, the James household travelled to London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures, retreating to the United States when funds were low. Henry studied primarily with tutors, and briefly attended schools while the family travelled in Europe. Their longest stays were in France, where Henry began to feel at home and became fluent in French. He had a stutter, which seems to have manifested itself only when he spoke English; in French, he did not stutter.[7]

 
James, age 16

In 1860, the family returned to Newport. There, Henry became a friend of painter John La Farge, who introduced him to French literature, and in particular, to Balzac. James later called Balzac his "greatest master", and said that he had learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else.[8]

In the autumn of 1861, James received an injury, probably to his back, while fighting a fire. This injury, which resurfaced at times throughout his life, made him unfit for military service in the American Civil War.[8]

In 1864, the James family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to be near William, who had enrolled first in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and then in the medical school. In 1862, Henry attended Harvard Law School, but realised that he was not interested in studying law. He pursued his interest in literature and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston and Cambridge and formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, and with James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields, his first professional mentors.

His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket", published in 1863.[9] About a year later, "A Tragedy of Error", his first short story, was published anonymously. James's first literary payment was for an appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's novels, written for the North American Review. He wrote fiction and nonfiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where Fields was editor. In 1871, he published his first novel, Watch and Ward, in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly. The novel was later published in book form in 1878.

During a 14-month trip through Europe in 1869–70, he met John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and George Eliot. Rome impressed him profoundly. "Here I am then in the Eternal City", he wrote to his brother William. "At last—for the first time—I live!"[10] He attempted to support himself as a freelance writer in Rome and then secured a position as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune through the influence of its editor, John Hay. When these efforts failed, he returned to New York City. During 1874 and 1875, he published Transatlantic Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson. During this early period in his career, he was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne.[11]

In the fall of 1875, he moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris. Aside from two trips to America, he spent the next three decades—the rest of his life—in Europe. In Paris, he met Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, Turgenev and others.[12] He stayed in Paris only a year before settling in London, where he established relationships with Macmillan and other publishers, who paid for serial installments that they published in book form. The audience for these serialized novels was largely made up of middle-class women, and James struggled to fashion serious literary work within the strictures imposed by editors' and publishers' notions of what was suitable for young women to read. He lived in rented rooms, but was able to join gentlemen's clubs that had libraries and where he could entertain male friends. He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams and Charles Milnes Gaskell, the latter introducing him to the Travellers' and the Reform Clubs.[13][14] He was also an honorary member of the Savile Club, St James's Club and, in 1882, the Athenaeum Club.[15][16]

In England, he met the leading figures of politics and culture. He continued to be a prolific writer, producing The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), a revision of Watch and Ward (1878), French Poets and Novelists (1878), Hawthorne (1879), and several shorter works of fiction. In 1878, Daisy Miller established his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. It drew notice perhaps mostly because it depicted a woman whose behavior is outside the social norms of Europe. He also began his first masterpiece,[17] The Portrait of a Lady, which appeared in 1881.

In 1877, he first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, home of his friend Charles Milnes Gaskell, whom he had met through Henry Adams. He was much inspired by the darkly romantic abbey and the surrounding countryside, which feature in his essay "Abbeys and Castles".[13] In particular, the gloomy monastic fishponds behind the abbey are said to have inspired the lake in The Turn of the Screw.[18]

While living in London, James continued to follow the careers of the French realists, Émile Zola in particular. Their stylistic methods influenced his own work in the years to come.[19] Hawthorne's influence on him faded during this period, replaced by George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev.[11] The period from 1878 to 1881 had the publication of The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence and The Portrait of a Lady.

The period from 1882 to 1883 was marked by several losses. His mother died in January 1882, while James was in Washington, D.C., on an extended visit to America.[20] He returned to his parents' home in Cambridge, where he was together with all four of his siblings for the first time in 15 years.[21] He returned to Europe in mid-1882, but was back in America by the end of the year following the death of his father. Emerson, an old family friend, died in 1882. His brother Wilkie and friend Turgenev both died in 1883.

Middle years, 1884–1897 edit

In 1884, James made another visit to Paris, where he met again with Zola, Daudet, and Goncourt. He had been following the careers of the French "realist" or "naturalist" writers, and was increasingly influenced by them.[19] In 1886, he published The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, both influenced by the French writers that he had studied assiduously. Critical reaction and sales were poor. He wrote to Howells that the books had hurt his career rather than helped because they had "reduced the desire, and demand, for my productions to zero.”[22] During this time, he became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, John Singer Sargent, Edmund Gosse, George du Maurier, Paul Bourget, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. His third novel from the 1880s was The Tragic Muse. Although he was following the precepts of Zola in his novels of the '80s, their tone and attitude are closer to the fiction of Alphonse Daudet.[23] The lack of critical and financial success for his novels during this period led him to try writing for the theatre;[24] His dramatic works and his experiences with theatre are discussed below.

In the last quarter of 1889, "for pure and copious lucre,"[25] he started translating Port Tarascon, the third volume of Daudet's adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon. Serialized in Harper's Monthly from June 1890, this translation – praised as "clever" by The Spectator[26] – was published in January 1891 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington.

After the stage failure of Guy Domville in 1895, James was near despair and thoughts of death plagued him.[27] His depression was compounded by the deaths of those closest to him, including his sister Alice in 1892; his friend Wolcott Balestier in 1891; and Stevenson and Fenimore Woolson in 1894. The sudden death of Fenimore Woolson in January 1894, and the speculations of suicide surrounding her death, were particularly painful for him.[28] Leon Edel wrote that the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson's death were such that "we can read a strong element of guilt and bewilderment in his letters, and, even more, in those extraordinary tales of the next half-dozen years, "The Altar of the Dead" and "The Beast in the Jungle".[28]

The years spent on dramatic works were not entirely a loss. As he moved into the last phase of his career, he found ways to adapt dramatic techniques into the novel form. In the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, James made several trips through Europe. He spent a long stay in Italy in 1887. In that year, he published the short novel The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator.[citation needed]

Late years, 1898–1916 edit

 
James in 1890
 
Grave marker in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

In 1897–1898, he moved to Rye, Sussex and wrote The Turn of the Screw; 1899–1900 had the publication of The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount. During 1902–1904, he wrote The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

In 1904, he revisited America and lectured on Balzac. In 1906–1910, he published The American Scene and edited the "New York Edition", a 24-volume collection of his works. In 1910, his brother William died; Henry had just joined William from an unsuccessful search for relief in Europe, on what turned out to be Henry's last visit to the United States (summer 1910 to July 1911) and was near him when he died.[29]

In 1913, he wrote his autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others, and Notes of a Son and Brother. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he did war work. In 1915, he became a British citizen and was awarded the Order of Merit the following year. He died on 28 February 1916, in Chelsea, London, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. A memorial was built to him in Chelsea Old Church. He had requested that his ashes be buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts.[30] This was not legally possible, but William's wife smuggled his ashes onboard a ship and sneaked them through customs, allowing her to bury him in their family plot.[31]

Sexuality edit

James regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and after settling in London, proclaimed himself "a bachelor". F. W. Dupee, in several volumes on the James family, originated the theory that he had been in love with his cousin, Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism ... was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir, A Small Boy and Others, recounting a dream of a Napoleonic image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled.[32][33]

Between 1953 and 1972, Leon Edel wrote a major five-volume biography of James, which used unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained the permission of James's family. Edel's portrayal of James included the suggestion he was celibate, a view first propounded by critic Saul Rosenzweig in 1943.[34] In 1996, Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master, followed by Henry James: The Mature Master (2007). The first book "caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles"[35] as it challenged the previous received notion of celibacy, a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was nonexistent. Novick also criticized Edel for following the discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."[35] The difference of opinion erupted in a series of exchanges between Edel (and later Fred Kaplan filling in for Edel) and Novick, which were published by the online magazine Slate, with Novick arguing that even the suggestion of celibacy went against James's own injunction "live!"—not "fantasize!"[36]

A letter James wrote in old age to Hugh Walpole has been cited as an explicit statement of this. Walpole confessed to him of indulging in "high jinks", and James wrote a reply endorsing it: "We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours & mine, what we are talking about—& the only way to know it is to have lived & loved & cursed & floundered & enjoyed & suffered—I don't think I regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth".[37]

The interpretation of James as living a less austere emotional life has been subsequently explored by other scholars.[38] The often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship has also been the subject of studies.[39] Author Colm Tóibín has said that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet made a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read as a homosexual writer whose desire to keep his sexuality a secret shaped his layered style and dramatic artistry. According to Tóibín, such a reading "removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary."[40]

James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of 6 May 1904, to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry".[41][42] How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers,[43] but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasierotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment."[44]

His numerous letters to the many young homosexual men among his close male friends are more forthcoming. To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile, I can only try to live without you."[45] In another letter Sturgis, following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two".[46] In letters to Hugh Walpole, he pursues convoluted jokes and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who "paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well-meaning old trunk".[47] His letters to Walter Berry printed by the Black Sun Press have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism.[48]

However, James corresponded in equally extravagant language with his many female friends, writing, for example, to fellow novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others."[49] To his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones: "Dearest Mary Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me wonder if poor unconscious & doting old Célimare [Jones's pet name for James] has 'done' anything, in some dark somnambulism of the spirit, which has ... given you a bad moment, or a wrong impression, or a 'colourable pretext' ... However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life ..."[50] His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon. Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers have objected to Edel's account.[citation needed][nb 1]

Works edit

Main article: Henry James bibliography

Style and themes edit

James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World (Europe), embodying a feudal civilisation that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive, and embody the virtues of the new American society—particularly personal freedom and a more exacting moral character. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly.

His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse, and as his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work:

 
Portrait of Henry James, charcoal drawing by John Singer Sargent (1912)

When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light ... His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.[51]

Philip Guedalla jokingly described three phases in the development of James's prose: "James I, James II, and The Old Pretender,"[52] and observers do often group his works of fiction into three periods. In his apprentice years, culminating with the masterwork The Portrait of a Lady, his style was simple and direct (by the standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented widely with forms and methods, generally narrating from a conventionally omniscient point of view. Plots generally concern romance, except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period. In the second period, as noted above, he abandoned the serialized novel and from 1890 to about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. Finally, in his third and last period he returned to the long, serialised novel. Beginning in the second period, but most noticeably in the third; he increasingly abandoned direct statement in favour of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive imagery. Single paragraphs began to run for page after page, in which an initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, and verbs would be deferred and then preceded by a series of adverbs. The overall effect could be a vivid evocation of a scene as perceived by a sensitive observer. It has been debated whether this change of style was engendered by James's shifting from writing to dictating to a typist,[53] a change made during the composition of What Maisie Knew.[54]

In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James's later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th-century fiction.[55][nb 2] Indeed, he might have influenced stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf, who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them.[56] Both contemporary and modern readers have found the late style difficult and unnecessary; his friend Edith Wharton, who admired him greatly, said that some passages in his work were all but incomprehensible.[57] James was harshly portrayed by H. G. Wells as a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that had got into a corner of its cage.[58] The "late James" style was ably parodied by Max Beerbohm in "The Mote in the Middle Distance".[59]

More important for his work overall may have been his position as an expatriate, and in other ways an outsider, living in Europe. While he came from middle-class and provincial beginnings (seen from the perspective of European polite society), he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society, and the settings of his fiction range from working-class to aristocratic, and often describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to make their way in European capitals. He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends.[citation needed][nb 3] He worked for a living, however, and lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the common bonds of masculine society. He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality.[60][nb 4] Edmund Wilson compared James's objectivity to Shakespeare's:

One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not, like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.[61]

Many of James's stories may also be seen as psychological thought experiments about selection. In his preface to the New York edition of The American, James describes the development of the story in his mind as exactly such: the "situation" of an American, "some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot..." with the focus of the story being on the response of this wronged man.[62] The Portrait of a Lady may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich. In many of his tales, characters seem to exemplify alternative futures and possibilities, as most markedly in "The Jolly Corner", in which the protagonist and a ghost-doppelganger live alternative American and European lives; and in others, like The Ambassadors, an older James seems fondly to regard his own younger self facing a crucial moment.[citation needed][nb 5]

Major novels edit

The first period of James's fiction, usually considered to have culminated in The Portrait of a Lady, concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America. The style of these novels is generally straightforward and, though personally characteristic, well within the norms of 19th-century fiction. Roderick Hudson (1875) is a Künstlerroman that traces the development of the title character, an extremely talented sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of immaturity—this was James's first serious attempt at a full-length novel—it has attracted favourable comment due to the vivid realisation of the three major characters: Roderick Hudson, superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable; Rowland Mallet, Roderick's limited but much more mature friend and patron; and Christina Light, one of James's most enchanting and maddening femmes fatales. The pair of Hudson and Mallet has been seen as representing the two sides of James's own nature: the wildly imaginative artist and the brooding conscientious mentor.[63]

In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains his most popular piece of long fiction. The story is of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who "affronts her destiny" and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. The narrative is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, The Portrait of a Lady is described as a psychological novel, exploring the minds of his characters, and almost a work of social science, exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans, the old and the new worlds.[64]

The second period of James's career, which extends from the publication of The Portrait of a Lady through the end of the 19th century, features less popular novels, including The Princess Casamassima, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885–1886, and The Bostonians, published serially in The Century during the same period. This period also featured James's celebrated Gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898).

The third period of James's career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just around the start of the 20th century: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Critic F. O. Matthiessen called this "trilogy" James's major phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study. The second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove, was the first published because it was not serialized.[65] This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honourable motives, while others are more self-interested. James stated in his autobiographical books that Milly was based on Minny Temple, his beloved cousin, who died at an early age of tuberculosis. He said that he attempted in the novel to wrap her memory in the "beauty and dignity of art".[66]

Shorter narratives edit

 
Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, where James lived from 1897 to 1914

James was particularly interested in what he called the "beautiful and blest nouvelle", or the longer form of short narrative. Still, he produced a number of very short stories in which he achieved notable compression of sometimes complex subjects. The following narratives are representative of James's achievement in the shorter forms of fiction.[citation needed]

Plays edit

At several points in his career, James wrote plays, beginning with one-act plays written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871[67] and a dramatisation of his popular novella Daisy Miller in 1882.[68] From 1890 to 1892, having received a bequest that freed him from magazine publication, he made a strenuous effort to succeed on the London stage, writing a half-dozen plays, of which only one, a dramatisation of his novel The American, was produced. This play was performed for several years by a touring repertory company, and had a respectable run in London, but did not earn very much money for James. His other plays written at this time were not produced.[citation needed]

In 1893, however, he responded to a request from actor-manager George Alexander for a serious play for the opening of his renovated St. James's Theatre, and wrote a long drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander produced. A noisy uproar arose on the opening night, 5 January 1895, with hissing from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain, and the author was upset. The play received moderately good reviews and had a modest run of four weeks before being taken off to make way for Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which Alexander thought would have better prospects for the coming season.[citation needed]

After the stresses and disappointment of these efforts, James insisted that he would write no more for the theatre, but within weeks had agreed to write a curtain-raiser for Ellen Terry. This became the one-act "Summersoft", which he later rewrote into a short story, "Covering End", and then expanded into a full-length play, The High Bid, which had a brief run in London in 1907, when James made another concerted effort to write for the stage. He wrote three new plays, two of which were in production when the death of Edward VII on 6 May 1910 plunged London into mourning and theatres closed. Discouraged by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work, James did not renew his efforts in the theatre, but recycled his plays as successful novels. The Outcry was a best-seller in the United States when it was published in 1911. During 1890–1893, when he was most engaged with the theatre, James wrote a good deal of theatrical criticism, and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time in London.[69]

Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was traumatised by the opening-night uproar that greeted Guy Domville, and that it plunged him into a prolonged depression. The successful later novels, in Edel's view, were the result of a kind of self-analysis, expressed in fiction, which partly freed him from his fears. Other biographers and scholars have not accepted this account, with the more common view being that of F.O. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes [for the theatre]... he felt a resurgence of new energy."[70][71][72]

Nonfiction edit

Beyond his fiction, James was one of the more important literary critics in the history of the novel. In his classic essay The Art of Fiction (1884), he argued against rigid prescriptions on the novelist's choice of subject and method of treatment. He maintained that the widest possible freedom in content and approach would help ensure narrative fiction's continued vitality. James wrote many critical articles on other novelists; typical is his book-length study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which has been the subject of critical debate. Richard Brodhead has suggested that the study was emblematic of James's struggle with Hawthorne's influence, and constituted an effort to place the elder writer "at a disadvantage."[73] Gordon Fraser, meanwhile, has suggested that the study was part of a more commercial effort by James to introduce himself to British readers as Hawthorne's natural successor.[74]

When James assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years, he wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to searching, occasionally harsh criticism.[citation needed]

 
Photograph of Henry James (1897)

At 22, James wrote The Noble School of Fiction for The Nation's first issue in 1865. He wrote, in all, over 200 essays and book, art, and theatre reviews for the magazine.[75]

For most of his life, James harboured ambitions for success as a playwright. He converted his novel The American into a play that enjoyed modest returns in the early 1890s. In all, he wrote about a dozen plays, most of which went unproduced. His costume drama Guy Domville failed disastrously on its opening night in 1895. James then largely abandoned his efforts to conquer the stage and returned to his fiction. In his Notebooks, he maintained that his theatrical experiment benefited his novels and tales by helping him dramatise his characters' thoughts and emotions. James produced a small amount of theatrical criticism, including appreciations of Henrik Ibsen.[76][nb 6]

With his wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on the visual arts. He wrote a favourable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent, a painter whose critical status has improved markedly since the mid twentieth century. James also wrote sometimes charming, sometimes brooding articles about various places where he visited and lived. His books of travel writing include Italian Hours (an example of the charming approach) and The American Scene (on the brooding side).[citation needed]

James was one of the great letter-writers of any era. More than 10,000 of his personal letters are extant, and over 3,000 have been published in a large number of collections. A complete edition of James's letters began publication in 2006, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias. As of 2014, eight volumes have been published, covering from 1855 to 1880.[77] James's correspondents included contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, and Joseph Conrad, along with many others in his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. The content of the letters range from trivialities to serious discussions of artistic, social, and personal issues.[78]

Very late in life, James began a series of autobiographical works: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the unfinished The Middle Years. These books portray the development of a classic observer who was passionately interested in artistic creation but was somewhat reticent about participating fully in the life around him.[33]

Reception edit

Criticism, biographies and fictional treatments edit

 
Interior view of Lamb House, James's residence from 1897 until 1914 (1898)

James's work has remained steadily popular with the limited audience of educated readers to whom he spoke during his lifetime, and has remained firmly in the canon, but after his death, some American critics, such as Van Wyck Brooks, expressed hostility towards James for his long expatriation and eventual naturalisation as a British subject.[79] Other critics such as E. M. Forster complained about what they saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly controversial material, or dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure, relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language.[80] 'Even in his lifetime,' explains scholar Hazel Hutchinson, 'James had a reputation as a difficult writer for clever readers.'[81] Oscar Wilde criticised him for writing "fiction as if it were a painful duty".[82] Vernon Parrington, composing a canon of American literature, condemned James for having cut himself off from America. Jorge Luis Borges wrote about him, "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."[83] And Virginia Woolf, writing to Lytton Strachey, asked, "Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"[84] Novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote, "He did not know the English as an Englishman instinctively knows them and so his English characters never to my mind quite ring true," and argued, "The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately. Henry James was content to observe it from a window."[85] Maugham nevertheless wrote, "The fact remains that those last novels of his, notwithstanding their unreality, make all other novels, except the very best, unreadable."[86] Colm Tóibín observed that James "never really wrote about the English very well. His English characters don't work for me."[87]

Despite these criticisms, James is now valued for his psychological and moral realism, his masterful creation of character, his low-key but playful humour, and his assured command of the language. In his 1983 book, The Novels of Henry James, Edward Wagenknecht offers an assessment that echoes Theodora Bosanquet's:

"To be completely great," Henry James wrote in an early review, "a work of art must lift up the heart," and his own novels do this to an outstanding degree ... More than sixty years after his death, the great novelist who sometimes professed to have no opinions stands foursquare in the great Christian humanistic and democratic tradition. The men and women who, at the height of World War II, raided the secondhand shops for his out-of-print books knew what they were about. For no writer ever raised a braver banner to which all who love freedom might adhere.[88]

William Dean Howells saw James as a representative of a new realist school of literary art, which broke with the English romantic tradition epitomised by the works of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. Howells wrote that realism found "its chief exemplar in Mr. James ... A novelist he is not, after the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own."[89] F. R. Leavis championed Henry James as a novelist of "established pre-eminence" in The Great Tradition (1948), asserting that The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were "the two most brilliant novels in the language."[90] James is now prized as a master of point of view who moved literary fiction forward by insisting in showing, not telling, his stories to the reader.

Portrayals in fiction edit

Henry James has been the subject of a number of novels and stories, including:[91]

David Lodge also wrote a long essay about writing about Henry James in his collection The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel.

Adaptations edit

Henry James stories and novels have been adapted to film, television, and music video over 150 times (some TV shows did upwards of a dozen stories) from 1933 to 2018.[93] The majority of these are in English, but with adaptations in French (13), Spanish (7), Italian (6), German (5), Portuguese (1), Yugoslavian (1), and Swedish (1).[93] Those most frequently adapted include:

Notes edit

  1. ^ See e.g. Cheryl Torsney, Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry (1989, "Edel's text ... a convention-laden male fantasy").
  2. ^ See James's prefaces, Horne's study of his revisions for The New York Edition, Edward Wagenknecht's The Novels of Henry James (1983) among many discussions of the changes in James's narrative technique and style over the course of his career.
  3. ^ James's prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction often discuss such origins for his stories. See, for instance, the preface to The Spoils of Poynton.
  4. ^ James himself noted his "outsider" status. In a letter of 2 October 1901, to W. Morton Fullerton, James talked of the "essential loneliness of my life" as "the deepest thing" about him.[60]
  5. ^ Millicent Bell explores such themes in her monograph Meaning in Henry James
  6. ^ For a general discussion of James's efforts as a playwright, see Edel's referenced edition of his plays.

References edit

  1. ^ Dr. Jack C. Wolf, "Henry James and Impressionist Painting"
  2. ^ "Nomination Database". www.nobelprize.org. from the original on 16 July 2017.
  3. ^ "Henry James – Library of America". www.loa.org. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  4. ^ Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.[ISBN missing]
  5. ^ Leon Edel (1974). Henry James Letters Vol. 1: 1843–1875. Belknap Press of Harvard University. pp. 3–4.
  6. ^ Letters of William James, p. 3
  7. ^ "The Man Who Talked Like a Book, Wrote Like He Spoke" (PDF). (PDF) from the original on 28 December 2017.
  8. ^ a b Powers (1970), p. 11
  9. ^ Novick (1996), p. 431
  10. ^ Powers (1970), p. 12
  11. ^ a b Powers (1970), p. 16
  12. ^ Powers (1970), p. 14
  13. ^ a b Gamble, Cynthia J. (2008). John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads, London: New European Publications
  14. ^ Gamble, Cynthia J. (2015). Wenlock Abbey 1857–1919: A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family. London: Ellingham Press.
  15. ^ Cowell, Frank Richard (1975). The Athenaeum: Club and Social Life in London, 1824–1974. London: Heinemann. p. 33. ISBN 0-435-32010-6.
  16. ^ Ward, Humphry (1926). History of the Athenaeum 1824–1925. London. p. 277.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  17. ^ Powers (1970), p. 15
  18. ^ Gamble, Cynthia, 2015 Wenlock Abbey 1857–1919: A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family, Ellingham Press.
  19. ^ a b Powers (1970), p. 17
  20. ^ Leon Edel (1975). The Letters of Henry James Vol. 2: 1875–1883. The Belknap Press of Harvard University. pp. 376–377.
  21. ^ Edel, 1975; p. 379
  22. ^ Edel 1955, p. 55.
  23. ^ Powers (1970), p. 19
  24. ^ Powers (1970), p. 20
  25. ^ Letter to Grace Norton, 22 Septembre 1890. Quoted in E. Harden, A Henry James Chronology, p. 85.
  26. ^ Port Tarascon, Literary supplement to The Spectator, n°3266, 31 January 1891, p. 147.
  27. ^ Powers (1970), p. 28
  28. ^ a b Leon Edel (1980). Henry James Letters Vol. 3: 1883–1895. The Belknap Press of Harvard University. p. xvii–xviii.
  29. ^ Kaplan chapter 15.
  30. ^ Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 23458–23459). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
  31. ^ Gunter (January 2009). Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James. U of Nebraska Press. p. 304. ISBN 978-0803222755.
  32. ^ Dupee (1949)[clarification needed]
  33. ^ a b Dupee (1951)
  34. ^ Graham, Wendy "Henry James's Twarted Love", Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 10
  35. ^ a b Leavitt, David (23 December 2007). "A Beast in the Jungle". New York Times. from the original on 19 May 2017.
  36. ^ "Henry James' Love Life". Slate. 24 January 1997. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  37. ^ Leavitt, David, 'A Beast in the Jungle', The New York Times, 23 December 2007
  38. ^ Graham, Wendy "Henry James's Thwarted Love"; Bradley, John "Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire"; Haralson, Eric "Henry James and Queer Modernity".
  39. ^ Anesko, Michael "Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship", Stanford University Press
  40. ^ Tóibín, Colm (20 February 2016). "How Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet". The Guardian. from the original on 28 May 2017.
  41. ^ Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley, eds. (1994), p. 271.
  42. ^ Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley, eds. (1997), William and Henry James: Selected Letters, The University Press of Virginia, p. 447.
  43. ^ Edel, 306–316[clarification needed]
  44. ^ Zorzi (2004)
  45. ^ Gunter & Jobe (2001)
  46. ^ Gunter & Jobe (2001), p. 125
  47. ^ Gunter & Jobe (2001), p. 179
  48. ^ Letters of Henry James to Walter Berry, Black Sun Press (1928).
  49. ^ Demoor and Chisholm (1999) p. 79
  50. ^ Gunter (2000), p. 146
  51. ^ Bosanquet (1982) pp. 275–276
  52. ^ Guedalla, Philip (1921). Supers & Supermen: Studies in Politics, History and Letters 25 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine, p. 45. Alfred A. Knopf. Retrieved 27 January 2014.
  53. ^ Miller, James E. Jr., ed. (1972). Theory of Fiction: Henry James 2 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine, pp. 268–69. University of Nebraska Press. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  54. ^ Edel, Leon, ed. (1984). Henry James: Letters, Vol. IV, 1895–1916 2 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine, p. 4. Harvard University Press. Retrieved 17 February 2014.
  55. ^ Wagenknecht (1983).
  56. ^ Woolf (March 2003) pp. 33, 39–40, 58, 86, 215, 301, 351.
  57. ^ Edith Wharton (1925) pp. 90–91
  58. ^ H. G. Wells, Boon (1915) p. 101.
  59. ^ Beerbohm, Max (1922). "The Mote in the Middle Distance." In A Christmas Garland 25 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine, p. 1. E.P. Dutton & Company. Retrieved 27 January 2014.
  60. ^ a b Leon Edel (1984) volume 4, p. 170
  61. ^ Dabney (1983) pp. 128–129
  62. ^ The American, 1907, p. vi–vii
  63. ^ Kraft (1969) p. 68.
  64. ^ Brownstein (2004)
  65. ^ Hazel Hutchison, Brief Lives: Henry James. London: Hesperus Press, 2012: "The elegiac tone of the novel did not appeal to periodical editors, and the novel went straight into book form in 1902, ahead of The Ambassadors, which ran in the North American Review from January to December 1903 and was published as a book later that same year." Retrieved 1 December 2017.
  66. ^ Posnock (1987) p. 114
  67. ^ Edel (1990) pp. 75, 89
  68. ^ Edel (1990) p. 121
  69. ^ Novick (2007) pp. 15–160 et passim.
  70. ^ Matthiessen and Murdoch (1981) p. 179.
  71. ^ Bradley (1999) p. 21, n
  72. ^ Novick (2007) pp. 219–225 et passim.
  73. ^ Richard Brodhead. The School of Hawthorne (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 137.
  74. ^ Gordon Fraser. "Anxiety of Audience: Economies of Readership in James's Hawthorne." The Henry James Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 1–2.
  75. ^ vanden Heuvel (1990) p. 5
  76. ^ Wade (1948) pp. 243–260.
  77. ^ . Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 10 February 2014.
  78. ^ Edel (1983) volume 4 p. 208
  79. ^ Brooks (1925)
  80. ^ Forster (1956) pp. 153–163
  81. ^ [1]. The Conversation. Retrieved 10 January 2021.
  82. ^ Oscar Wilde Quotes – Page 6. BrainyQuote. Retrieved 10 August 2011.
  83. ^ Borges and de Torres (1971) p. 55.
  84. ^ Reading Experience Database Display Record 13 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine. Can-red-lec.library.dal.ca. Retrieved 10 August 2011.
  85. ^ W. Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood, p. 203.
  86. ^ Maugham, op. cit., p209.
  87. ^ Colm Tóibín in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, 2004 19 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 7 December 2015.
  88. ^ Wagenknecht (1983) pp. 261–262
  89. ^ Lauter (2010) p. 364.
  90. ^ F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York University Press, 1969), p. 155.
  91. ^ "Henry James as a fictional character". blog.loa.org. from the original on 14 July 2014.
  92. ^ Australia, Writing. . Archived from the original on 5 March 2014.
  93. ^ a b "Henry James". IMDb.
  94. ^ "A Fera na Selva :: Entrevista exclusiva com Paulo Betti". Papo de Cinema (in Portuguese). 4 October 2017.
  95. ^ Oggiano, Roberto (31 January 2019). "Clara van Gool • Director of The Beast in the Jungle". Cineuropa.
  96. ^ Goodfellow, Melanie (18 January 2023). "'The Beast In The Jungle' Clip: Berlinale Henry James Adaptation Stars Anaïs Demoustier, Tom Mercier & Béatrice Dalle". Deadline. from the original on 22 January 2023. Retrieved 22 January 2023.
  97. ^ Roos, Gautier (25 December 2021). "[INTERVIEW BERTRAND BONELLO] Le grand entretien chaos" [[INTERVIEW BERTRAND BONELLO] The Great Chaos Interview]. Chaos Reign (in French).
  98. ^ Gennis, Sadie (10 October 2020). "The Haunting of Bly Manor's Henry James References, Explained". TV Guide.

Sources edit

  • Harold Bloom (2009) [2001]. Henry James. Infobase Publishing, originally published by Chelsea House. ISBN 978-1-4381-1601-3.
  • Jorge Luis Borges and Esther Zemborain de Torres (1971). An Introduction to American Literature. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
  • Theodora Bosanquet (1982). Henry James At Work. Haskell House Publishers Inc. pp. 275–276. ISBN 0-8383-0009-X
  • John R. Bradley, ed. (1999). Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-21764-1
  • John R. Bradley (2000). I Henry James on Stage and Screen Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-79214-9
  • John R. Bradley (2000). Henry James's Permanent Adolescence. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-91874-6
  • Van Wyck Brooks (1925). The Pilgrimage of Henry James
  • Gabriel Brownstein (2004). "Introduction," in James, Henry. Portrait of a Lady, Barnes & Noble Classics series, Spark Educational Publishing.
  • Lewis Dabney, ed. (1983). The Portable Edmund Wilson. ISBN 0-14-015098-6
  • Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm, editors (1999). Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends: Henry James's Letters to Lucy Clifford, University of Victoria (1999), p. 79 ISBN 0-920604-67-6
  • F.W. Dupee (1951). Henry James William Sloane Associates, The American Men of Letters Series.
  • Leon Edel, ed. (1955). The Selected Letters of Henry James New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Vol. 1
  • Leon Edel, ed. (1983). Henry James Letters.
  • Leon Edel, ed. (1990). The Complete Plays of Henry James. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504379-0
  • E.M. Forster (1956). Aspects of the Novel ISBN 0-674-38780-5
  • Gunter, Susan (2000). Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James's Letters to Four Women. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-11010-1.
  • Gunter, Susan E.; Jobe, Steven H. (2001). Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-11009-8.
  • Katrina vanden Heuvel (1990). The Nation 1865–1990, Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-001-1
  • James Kraft (1969). The early tales of Henry James. Southern Illinois University Press.
  • Paul Lauter (2010). A companion to American literature and culture. Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 364. ISBN 0-631-20892-5
  • Percy Lubbock, ed. (1920). The Letters of Henry James, vol. 1. New York: Scribner.
  • F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock, editors (1981) The Notebooks of Henry James. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-51104-9
  • Novick, Sheldon M (1996). Henry James: The Young Master. Random House. ISBN 0-394-58655-7.
  • Sheldon M. Novick (2007). Henry James: The Mature Master. Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-45023-8.
  • Ross Posnock (1987). "James, Browning, and the Theatrical Self," in Neuman, Mark and Payne, Michael. Self, sign, and symbol. Bucknell University Press.
  • Powers, Lyall H (1970). Henry James: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 978-0030789557.
  • Ignas Skrupskelis [lt] and Elizabeth Berkeley, editors (1994). The Correspondence of William James: Volume 3, William and Henry. 1897–1910. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  • Allan Wade, ed. (1948). Henry James: The Scenic Art, Notes on Acting and the Drama 1872–1901.
  • Edward Wagenknecht (1983). The Novels of Henry James.
  • Edith Wharton (1925) The Writing of Fiction.
  • Virginia Woolf (2003). A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Harcourt. pp. 33, 39–40, 58, 86, 215, 301, 351. ISBN 978-0-15-602791-5.
  • H.G. Wells, Boon. (1915) The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. London: T. Fisher Unwin p. 101.
  • Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, ed. (2004). Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 0-8139-2270-4

Further reading edit

General edit

  • A Bibliography of Henry James: Third Edition by Leon Edel, Dan Laurence and James Rambeau (1982). ISBN 1-58456-005-3
  • A Henry James Encyclopedia by Robert L. Gale (1989). ISBN 0-313-25846-5
  • A Henry James Chronology by Edgar F. Harden (2005). ISBN 1403942293
  • The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master. Edited by Michael Gorra (2016). ISBN 978-0-226-40854-5
  • Henry James A Bibliographical Catalogue of Editions to 1921, 2nd Edition Revised, By David J. Supino, Liverpool U. Press 2014

Autobiography edit

  • A Small Boy and Others: A Critical Edition edited by Peter Collister (2011). ISBN 0813930820
  • Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition edited by Peter Collister (2011) ISBN 0813930847
  • Autobiographies edited by Philip Horne (2016). Contains A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years, other autobiographical writings, and Henry James at Work, by Theodora Bosanquet. ISBN 978-1598534719

Bibliography edit

Biography edit

Letters edit

  • Theatre and Friendship by Elizabeth Robins. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932.
  • Henry James: Letters edited by Leon Edel (four vols. 1974–1984)
  • Henry James: A Life in Letters edited by Philip Horne (1999) ISBN 0-670-88563-0
  • The Complete Letters of Henry James,1855–1872 edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg Zacharias (two vols., University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
  • The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876 edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias (three vols., University of Nebraska Press, 2008)

Editions edit

  • Complete Stories 1864–1874 (Jean Strouse, ed, Library of America, 1999) ISBN 978-1-883011-70-3
  • Complete Stories 1874–1884 (William Vance, ed, Library of America, 1999) ISBN 978-1-883011-63-5
  • Complete Stories 1884–1891 (Edward Said, ed, Library of America, 1999) ISBN 978-1-883011-64-2
  • Complete Stories 1892–1898 (John Hollander, David Bromwich, Denis Donoghue, eds, Library of America, 1996) ISBN 978-1-883011-09-3
  • Complete Stories 1898–1910 (John Hollander, David Bromwich, Denis Donoghue, eds, Library of America, 1996) ISBN 978-1-883011-10-9
  • Novels 1871–1880: Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Confidence (William T. Stafford, ed., Library of America, 1983) ISBN 978-0-940450-13-4
  • Novels 1881–1886: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians (William T. Stafford, ed, Library of America, 1985) ISBN 978-0-940450-30-1
  • Novels 1886–1890: The Princess Casamassima, The Reverberator, The Tragic Muse (Daniel Mark Fogel, ed, Library of America, 1989) ISBN 978-0-940450-56-1
  • Novels 1896–1899: The Other House, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age (Myra Jehlen, ed, Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-931082-30-3
  • Novels 1901–1902: The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove (Leo Bersani, ed, Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-88-4
  • Collected Travel Writings, Great Britain and America: English Hours; The American Scene; Other Travels edited by Richard Howard (Library of America, 1993) ISBN 978-0-940450-76-9
  • Collected Travel Writings, The Continent: A Little Tour in France, Italian Hours, Other Travels edited by Richard Howard (Library of America, 1993) ISBN 0-940450-77-1
  • Literary Criticism Volume One: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (Library of America, 1984) ISBN 978-0-940450-22-6
  • Literary Criticism Volume Two: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (Library of America, 1984) ISBN 978-0-940450-23-3
  • The Complete Notebooks of Henry James edited by Leon Edel and Lyall Powers (1987) ISBN 0-19-503782-0
  • The Complete Plays of Henry James edited by Leon Edel (1991) ISBN 0195043790
  • Henry James: Autobiography edited by F.W. Dupee (1956)
  • The American: an Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism edited by James Tuttleton (1978) ISBN 0-393-09091-4
  • The Ambassadors: An Authoritative Text, The Author on the Novel, Criticism edited by S.P. Rosenbaum (1994) ISBN 0-393-96314-4
  • The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism edited by Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren (1999) ISBN 0-393-95904-X
  • The Portrait of a Lady: An Authoritative Text, Henry James and the Novel, Reviews and Criticism edited by Robert Bamberg (2003) ISBN 0-393-96646-1
  • The Wings of the Dove: Authoritative Text, The Author and the Novel, Criticism edited by J. Donald Crowley and Richard Hocks (2003) ISBN 0-393-97881-8
  • Tales of Henry James: The Texts of the Tales, the Author on His Craft, Criticism edited by Christof Wegelin and Henry Wonham (2003) ISBN 0-393-97710-2
  • The Portable Henry James, New Edition edited by John Auchard (2004) ISBN 0-14-243767-0
  • Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene edited by Pierre Walker (1999) ISBN 0-8032-2589-X

Criticism edit

External links edit

Electronic editions edit

December 02, 2023
henry, james, other, people, named, disambiguation, 1843, april, 1843, 1916, february, 1916, american, british, author, regarded, transitional, figure, between, literary, realism, literary, modernism, considered, many, among, greatest, novelists, english, lang. For other people named Henry James see Henry James disambiguation Henry James OM 1843 04 15 15 April 1843 1916 02 28 28 February 1916 was an American British author He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language He was the son of Henry James Sr and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James Henry JamesOMJames in 1913Born 1843 04 15 15 April 1843New York City U S Died28 February 1916 1916 02 28 aged 72 Chelsea London EnglandOccupationWriterCitizenshipAmerican 1843 1915 British 1915 1916 Alma materHarvard Law SchoolPeriod1863 1916Notable worksThe American 1877 Daisy Miller 1879 Washington Square 1880 The Portrait of a Lady 1881 The Bostonians 1886 The Aspern Papers 1888 What Maisie Knew 1897 The Turn of the Screw 1898 The Wings of the Dove 1902 The Ambassadors 1903 The Golden Bowl 1904 RelativesHenry James Sr father William James brother Alice James sister SignatureHe is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between emigreAmericans the English and continental Europeans such as The Portrait of a Lady His later works such as The Ambassadors The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character s psyche For their unique ambiguity as well as for other aspects of their composition his late works have been compared to impressionist painting 1 His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories such as The Jolly Corner James published articles and books of criticism travel biography autobiography and plays Born in the United States James largely relocated to Europe as a young man and eventually settled in England becoming a British citizen in 1915 a year before his death James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 1912 and 1916 2 Jorge Luis Borges said I have visited some literatures of East and West I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature I have translated Kafka Melville and Bloy I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James 3 Contents 1 Life 1 1 Early years 1843 1883 1 2 Middle years 1884 1897 1 3 Late years 1898 1916 1 4 Sexuality 2 Works 2 1 Style and themes 2 2 Major novels 2 3 Shorter narratives 2 4 Plays 2 5 Nonfiction 3 Reception 3 1 Criticism biographies and fictional treatments 4 Portrayals in fiction 5 Adaptations 6 Notes 7 References 8 Sources 9 Further reading 9 1 General 9 2 Autobiography 9 3 Bibliography 9 4 Biography 9 5 Letters 9 6 Editions 9 7 Criticism 10 External links 10 1 Electronic editionsLife editEarly years 1843 1883 edit nbsp Henry James age 11 with his father Henry James Sr 1854 daguerreotype by Mathew BradyJames was born at 21 Washington Place in New York City on 15 April 1843 His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr His father was intelligent and steadfastly congenial He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent means from his father an Albany banker and investor Mary came from a wealthy family long settled in New York City Her sister Katherine lived with her adult family for an extended period of time Henry Jr was one of four boys the others being William who was one year his senior and younger brothers Wilkinson Wilkie and Robertson His younger sister was Alice Both of his parents were of Irish and Scottish descent 4 Before he was a year old his father sold the house at Washington Place and took the family to Europe where they lived for a time in a cottage in Windsor Great Park in England The family returned to New York in 1845 and Henry spent much of his childhood living between his paternal grandmother s home in Albany and a house on 14th Street in Manhattan 5 His education was calculated by his father to expose him to many influences primarily scientific and philosophical it was described by Percy Lubbock the editor of his selected letters as extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous 6 James did not share the usual education in Latin and Greek classics Between 1855 and 1860 the James household travelled to London Paris Geneva Boulogne sur Mer and Newport Rhode Island according to the father s current interests and publishing ventures retreating to the United States when funds were low Henry studied primarily with tutors and briefly attended schools while the family travelled in Europe Their longest stays were in France where Henry began to feel at home and became fluent in French He had a stutter which seems to have manifested itself only when he spoke English in French he did not stutter 7 nbsp James age 16In 1860 the family returned to Newport There Henry became a friend of painter John La Farge who introduced him to French literature and in particular to Balzac James later called Balzac his greatest master and said that he had learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else 8 In the autumn of 1861 James received an injury probably to his back while fighting a fire This injury which resurfaced at times throughout his life made him unfit for military service in the American Civil War 8 In 1864 the James family moved to Boston Massachusetts to be near William who had enrolled first in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and then in the medical school In 1862 Henry attended Harvard Law School but realised that he was not interested in studying law He pursued his interest in literature and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston and Cambridge and formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr the future Supreme Court justice and with James T Fields and Annie Adams Fields his first professional mentors His first published work was a review of a stage performance Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket published in 1863 9 About a year later A Tragedy of Error his first short story was published anonymously James s first literary payment was for an appreciation of Sir Walter Scott s novels written for the North American Review He wrote fiction and nonfiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly where Fields was editor In 1871 he published his first novel Watch and Ward in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly The novel was later published in book form in 1878 During a 14 month trip through Europe in 1869 70 he met John Ruskin Charles Dickens Matthew Arnold William Morris and George Eliot Rome impressed him profoundly Here I am then in the Eternal City he wrote to his brother William At last for the first time I live 10 He attempted to support himself as a freelance writer in Rome and then secured a position as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune through the influence of its editor John Hay When these efforts failed he returned to New York City During 1874 and 1875 he published Transatlantic Sketches A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson During this early period in his career he was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne 11 In the fall of 1875 he moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris Aside from two trips to America he spent the next three decades the rest of his life in Europe In Paris he met Zola Daudet Maupassant Turgenev and others 12 He stayed in Paris only a year before settling in London where he established relationships with Macmillan and other publishers who paid for serial installments that they published in book form The audience for these serialized novels was largely made up of middle class women and James struggled to fashion serious literary work within the strictures imposed by editors and publishers notions of what was suitable for young women to read He lived in rented rooms but was able to join gentlemen s clubs that had libraries and where he could entertain male friends He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams and Charles Milnes Gaskell the latter introducing him to the Travellers and the Reform Clubs 13 14 He was also an honorary member of the Savile Club St James s Club and in 1882 the Athenaeum Club 15 16 In England he met the leading figures of politics and culture He continued to be a prolific writer producing The American 1877 The Europeans 1878 a revision of Watch and Ward 1878 French Poets and Novelists 1878 Hawthorne 1879 and several shorter works of fiction In 1878 Daisy Miller established his fame on both sides of the Atlantic It drew notice perhaps mostly because it depicted a woman whose behavior is outside the social norms of Europe He also began his first masterpiece 17 The Portrait of a Lady which appeared in 1881 In 1877 he first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire home of his friend Charles Milnes Gaskell whom he had met through Henry Adams He was much inspired by the darkly romantic abbey and the surrounding countryside which feature in his essay Abbeys and Castles 13 In particular the gloomy monastic fishponds behind the abbey are said to have inspired the lake in The Turn of the Screw 18 While living in London James continued to follow the careers of the French realists Emile Zola in particular Their stylistic methods influenced his own work in the years to come 19 Hawthorne s influence on him faded during this period replaced by George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev 11 The period from 1878 to 1881 had the publication of The Europeans Washington Square Confidence and The Portrait of a Lady The period from 1882 to 1883 was marked by several losses His mother died in January 1882 while James was in Washington D C on an extended visit to America 20 He returned to his parents home in Cambridge where he was together with all four of his siblings for the first time in 15 years 21 He returned to Europe in mid 1882 but was back in America by the end of the year following the death of his father Emerson an old family friend died in 1882 His brother Wilkie and friend Turgenev both died in 1883 Middle years 1884 1897 edit In 1884 James made another visit to Paris where he met again with Zola Daudet and Goncourt He had been following the careers of the French realist or naturalist writers and was increasingly influenced by them 19 In 1886 he published The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima both influenced by the French writers that he had studied assiduously Critical reaction and sales were poor He wrote to Howells that the books had hurt his career rather than helped because they had reduced the desire and demand for my productions to zero 22 During this time he became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson John Singer Sargent Edmund Gosse George du Maurier Paul Bourget and Constance Fenimore Woolson His third novel from the 1880s was The Tragic Muse Although he was following the precepts of Zola in his novels of the 80s their tone and attitude are closer to the fiction of Alphonse Daudet 23 The lack of critical and financial success for his novels during this period led him to try writing for the theatre 24 His dramatic works and his experiences with theatre are discussed below In the last quarter of 1889 for pure and copious lucre 25 he started translating Port Tarascon the third volume of Daudet s adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon Serialized in Harper s Monthly from June 1890 this translation praised as clever by The Spectator 26 was published in January 1891 by Sampson Low Marston Searle amp Rivington After the stage failure of Guy Domville in 1895 James was near despair and thoughts of death plagued him 27 His depression was compounded by the deaths of those closest to him including his sister Alice in 1892 his friend Wolcott Balestier in 1891 and Stevenson and Fenimore Woolson in 1894 The sudden death of Fenimore Woolson in January 1894 and the speculations of suicide surrounding her death were particularly painful for him 28 Leon Edel wrote that the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson s death were such that we can read a strong element of guilt and bewilderment in his letters and even more in those extraordinary tales of the next half dozen years The Altar of the Dead and The Beast in the Jungle 28 The years spent on dramatic works were not entirely a loss As he moved into the last phase of his career he found ways to adapt dramatic techniques into the novel form In the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s James made several trips through Europe He spent a long stay in Italy in 1887 In that year he published the short novel The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator citation needed Late years 1898 1916 edit nbsp James in 1890 nbsp Grave marker in Cambridge Cemetery Cambridge Massachusetts In 1897 1898 he moved to Rye Sussex and wrote The Turn of the Screw 1899 1900 had the publication of The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount During 1902 1904 he wrote The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl In 1904 he revisited America and lectured on Balzac In 1906 1910 he published The American Scene and edited the New York Edition a 24 volume collection of his works In 1910 his brother William died Henry had just joined William from an unsuccessful search for relief in Europe on what turned out to be Henry s last visit to the United States summer 1910 to July 1911 and was near him when he died 29 In 1913 he wrote his autobiographies A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he did war work In 1915 he became a British citizen and was awarded the Order of Merit the following year He died on 28 February 1916 in Chelsea London and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium A memorial was built to him in Chelsea Old Church He had requested that his ashes be buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts 30 This was not legally possible but William s wife smuggled his ashes onboard a ship and sneaked them through customs allowing her to bury him in their family plot 31 Sexuality edit James regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry and after settling in London proclaimed himself a bachelor F W Dupee in several volumes on the James family originated the theory that he had been in love with his cousin Mary Minnie Temple but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections James s invalidism was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part Dupee used an episode from James s memoir A Small Boy and Others recounting a dream of a Napoleonic image in the Louvre to exemplify James s romanticism about Europe a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled 32 33 Between 1953 and 1972 Leon Edel wrote a major five volume biography of James which used unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained the permission of James s family Edel s portrayal of James included the suggestion he was celibate a view first propounded by critic Saul Rosenzweig in 1943 34 In 1996 Sheldon M Novick published Henry James The Young Master followed by Henry James The Mature Master 2007 The first book caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles 35 as it challenged the previous received notion of celibacy a once familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was nonexistent Novick also criticized Edel for following the discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality as a kind of failure 35 The difference of opinion erupted in a series of exchanges between Edel and later Fred Kaplan filling in for Edel and Novick which were published by the online magazine Slate with Novick arguing that even the suggestion of celibacy went against James s own injunction live not fantasize 36 A letter James wrote in old age to Hugh Walpole has been cited as an explicit statement of this Walpole confessed to him of indulging in high jinks and James wrote a reply endorsing it We must know as much as possible in our beautiful art yours amp mine what we are talking about amp the only way to know it is to have lived amp loved amp cursed amp floundered amp enjoyed amp suffered I don t think I regret a single excess of my responsive youth 37 The interpretation of James as living a less austere emotional life has been subsequently explored by other scholars 38 The often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship has also been the subject of studies 39 Author Colm Toibin has said that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick s Epistemology of the Closet made a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read as a homosexual writer whose desire to keep his sexuality a secret shaped his layered style and dramatic artistry According to Toibin such a reading removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people He became our contemporary 40 James s letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention James met the 27 year old Andersen in Rome in 1899 when James was 56 and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional I hold you dearest boy in my innermost love amp count on your feeling me in every throb of your soul In a letter of 6 May 1904 to his brother William James referred to himself as always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry 41 42 How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James s biographers 43 but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasierotic I put my dear boy my arm around you amp feel the pulsation thereby as it were of our excellent future amp your admirable endowment 44 His numerous letters to the many young homosexual men among his close male friends are more forthcoming To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis James could write I repeat almost to indiscretion that I could live with you Meanwhile I can only try to live without you 45 In another letter Sturgis following a long visit James refers jocularly to their happy little congress of two 46 In letters to Hugh Walpole he pursues convoluted jokes and puns about their relationship referring to himself as an elephant who paws you oh so benevolently and winds about Walpole his well meaning old trunk 47 His letters to Walter Berry printed by the Black Sun Press have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism 48 However James corresponded in equally extravagant language with his many female friends writing for example to fellow novelist Lucy Clifford Dearest Lucy What shall I say when I love you so very very much and see you nine times for once that I see Others Therefore I think that if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence I love you more than I love Others 49 To his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones Dearest Mary Cadwalader I yearn over you but I yearn in vain amp your long silence really breaks my heart mystifies depresses almost alarms me to the point even of making me wonder if poor unconscious amp doting old Celimare Jones s pet name for James has done anything in some dark somnambulism of the spirit which has given you a bad moment or a wrong impression or a colourable pretext However these things may be he loves you as tenderly as ever nothing to the end of time will ever detach him from you amp he remembers those Eleventh St matutinal intimes hours those telephonic matinees as the most romantic of his life 50 His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887 and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894 are discussed in detail in Edel s biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness but Woolson s biographers have objected to Edel s account citation needed nb 1 Works editMain article Henry James bibliography Style and themes edit James is one of the major figures of trans Atlantic literature His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World Europe embodying a feudal civilisation that is beautiful often corrupt and alluring and from the New World United States where people are often brash open and assertive and embody the virtues of the new American society particularly personal freedom and a more exacting moral character James explores this clash of personalities and cultures in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse and as his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work nbsp Portrait of Henry James charcoal drawing by John Singer Sargent 1912 When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him he saw a place of torment where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed defenseless children of light His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity 51 Philip Guedalla jokingly described three phases in the development of James s prose James I James II and The Old Pretender 52 and observers do often group his works of fiction into three periods In his apprentice years culminating with the masterwork The Portrait of a Lady his style was simple and direct by the standards of Victorian magazine writing and he experimented widely with forms and methods generally narrating from a conventionally omniscient point of view Plots generally concern romance except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period In the second period as noted above he abandoned the serialized novel and from 1890 to about 1897 he wrote short stories and plays Finally in his third and last period he returned to the long serialised novel Beginning in the second period but most noticeably in the third he increasingly abandoned direct statement in favour of frequent double negatives and complex descriptive imagery Single paragraphs began to run for page after page in which an initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses far from their original referents and verbs would be deferred and then preceded by a series of adverbs The overall effect could be a vivid evocation of a scene as perceived by a sensitive observer It has been debated whether this change of style was engendered by James s shifting from writing to dictating to a typist 53 a change made during the composition of What Maisie Knew 54 In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters James s later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th century fiction 55 nb 2 Indeed he might have influenced stream of consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them 56 Both contemporary and modern readers have found the late style difficult and unnecessary his friend Edith Wharton who admired him greatly said that some passages in his work were all but incomprehensible 57 James was harshly portrayed by H G Wells as a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that had got into a corner of its cage 58 The late James style was ably parodied by Max Beerbohm in The Mote in the Middle Distance 59 More important for his work overall may have been his position as an expatriate and in other ways an outsider living in Europe While he came from middle class and provincial beginnings seen from the perspective of European polite society he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society and the settings of his fiction range from working class to aristocratic and often describe the efforts of middle class Americans to make their way in European capitals He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends citation needed nb 3 He worked for a living however and lacked the experiences of select schools university and army service the common bonds of masculine society He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo American culture rather feminine and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality 60 nb 4 Edmund Wilson compared James s objectivity to Shakespeare s One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century Racine and Moliere whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view and even Shakespeare when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form These poets are not like Dickens and Hardy writers of melodrama either humorous or pessimistic nor secretaries of society like Balzac nor prophets like Tolstoy they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting They do not indict society for these situations they regard them as universal and inevitable They do not even blame God for allowing them they accept them as the conditions of life 61 Many of James s stories may also be seen as psychological thought experiments about selection In his preface to the New York edition of The American James describes the development of the story in his mind as exactly such the situation of an American some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed some cruelly wronged compatriot with the focus of the story being on the response of this wronged man 62 The Portrait of a Lady may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich In many of his tales characters seem to exemplify alternative futures and possibilities as most markedly in The Jolly Corner in which the protagonist and a ghost doppelganger live alternative American and European lives and in others like The Ambassadors an older James seems fondly to regard his own younger self facing a crucial moment citation needed nb 5 Major novels edit The first period of James s fiction usually considered to have culminated in The Portrait of a Lady concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America The style of these novels is generally straightforward and though personally characteristic well within the norms of 19th century fiction Roderick Hudson 1875 is a Kunstlerroman that traces the development of the title character an extremely talented sculptor Although the book shows some signs of immaturity this was James s first serious attempt at a full length novel it has attracted favourable comment due to the vivid realisation of the three major characters Roderick Hudson superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable Rowland Mallet Roderick s limited but much more mature friend and patron and Christina Light one of James s most enchanting and maddening femmes fatales The pair of Hudson and Mallet has been seen as representing the two sides of James s own nature the wildly imaginative artist and the brooding conscientious mentor 63 In The Portrait of a Lady 1881 James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains his most popular piece of long fiction The story is of a spirited young American woman Isabel Archer who affronts her destiny and finds it overwhelming She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates The narrative is set mainly in Europe especially in England and Italy Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase The Portrait of a Lady is described as a psychological novel exploring the minds of his characters and almost a work of social science exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans the old and the new worlds 64 The second period of James s career which extends from the publication of The Portrait of a Lady through the end of the 19th century features less popular novels including The Princess Casamassima published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885 1886 and The Bostonians published serially in The Century during the same period This period also featured James s celebrated Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw 1898 The third period of James s career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just around the start of the 20th century The Wings of the Dove 1902 The Ambassadors 1903 and The Golden Bowl 1904 Critic F O Matthiessen called this trilogy James s major phase and these novels have certainly received intense critical study The second written of the books The Wings of the Dove was the first published because it was not serialized 65 This novel tells the story of Milly Theale an American heiress stricken with a serious disease and her impact on the people around her Some of these people befriend Milly with honourable motives while others are more self interested James stated in his autobiographical books that Milly was based on Minny Temple his beloved cousin who died at an early age of tuberculosis He said that he attempted in the novel to wrap her memory in the beauty and dignity of art 66 Shorter narratives edit nbsp Lamb House in Rye East Sussex where James lived from 1897 to 1914James was particularly interested in what he called the beautiful and blest nouvelle or the longer form of short narrative Still he produced a number of very short stories in which he achieved notable compression of sometimes complex subjects The following narratives are representative of James s achievement in the shorter forms of fiction citation needed A Tragedy of Error 1864 short story The Story of a Year 1865 short story A Passionate Pilgrim 1871 novella Madame de Mauves 1874 novella Daisy Miller 1878 novella The Aspern Papers 1888 novella The Lesson of the Master 1888 novella The Pupil 1891 short story The Figure in the Carpet 1896 short story The Beast in the Jungle 1903 novella An International Episode 1878 Picture and Text Four Meetings 1885 A London Life and Other Tales 1889 The Spoils of Poynton 1896 Embarrassments 1896 The Two Magics The Turn of the Screw Covering End 1898 In the Cage 1898 novella A Little Tour of France 1900 The Sacred Fount 1901 The Birthplace 1903 Views and Reviews 1908 The Finer Grain 1910 The Outcry 1911 Lady Barbarina The Siege of London An International Episode and Other Tales 1922 Plays edit At several points in his career James wrote plays beginning with one act plays written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871 67 and a dramatisation of his popular novella Daisy Miller in 1882 68 From 1890 to 1892 having received a bequest that freed him from magazine publication he made a strenuous effort to succeed on the London stage writing a half dozen plays of which only one a dramatisation of his novel The American was produced This play was performed for several years by a touring repertory company and had a respectable run in London but did not earn very much money for James His other plays written at this time were not produced citation needed In 1893 however he responded to a request from actor manager George Alexander for a serious play for the opening of his renovated St James s Theatre and wrote a long drama Guy Domville which Alexander produced A noisy uproar arose on the opening night 5 January 1895 with hissing from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain and the author was upset The play received moderately good reviews and had a modest run of four weeks before being taken off to make way for Oscar Wilde s The Importance of Being Earnest which Alexander thought would have better prospects for the coming season citation needed After the stresses and disappointment of these efforts James insisted that he would write no more for the theatre but within weeks had agreed to write a curtain raiser for Ellen Terry This became the one act Summersoft which he later rewrote into a short story Covering End and then expanded into a full length play The High Bid which had a brief run in London in 1907 when James made another concerted effort to write for the stage He wrote three new plays two of which were in production when the death of Edward VII on 6 May 1910 plunged London into mourning and theatres closed Discouraged by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work James did not renew his efforts in the theatre but recycled his plays as successful novels The Outcry was a best seller in the United States when it was published in 1911 During 1890 1893 when he was most engaged with the theatre James wrote a good deal of theatrical criticism and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time in London 69 Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was traumatised by the opening night uproar that greeted Guy Domville and that it plunged him into a prolonged depression The successful later novels in Edel s view were the result of a kind of self analysis expressed in fiction which partly freed him from his fears Other biographers and scholars have not accepted this account with the more common view being that of F O Matthiessen who wrote Instead of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes for the theatre he felt a resurgence of new energy 70 71 72 Nonfiction edit Beyond his fiction James was one of the more important literary critics in the history of the novel In his classic essay The Art of Fiction 1884 he argued against rigid prescriptions on the novelist s choice of subject and method of treatment He maintained that the widest possible freedom in content and approach would help ensure narrative fiction s continued vitality James wrote many critical articles on other novelists typical is his book length study of Nathaniel Hawthorne which has been the subject of critical debate Richard Brodhead has suggested that the study was emblematic of James s struggle with Hawthorne s influence and constituted an effort to place the elder writer at a disadvantage 73 Gordon Fraser meanwhile has suggested that the study was part of a more commercial effort by James to introduce himself to British readers as Hawthorne s natural successor 74 When James assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years he wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to searching occasionally harsh criticism citation needed nbsp Photograph of Henry James 1897 At 22 James wrote The Noble School of Fiction for The Nation s first issue in 1865 He wrote in all over 200 essays and book art and theatre reviews for the magazine 75 For most of his life James harboured ambitions for success as a playwright He converted his novel The American into a play that enjoyed modest returns in the early 1890s In all he wrote about a dozen plays most of which went unproduced His costume drama Guy Domville failed disastrously on its opening night in 1895 James then largely abandoned his efforts to conquer the stage and returned to his fiction In his Notebooks he maintained that his theatrical experiment benefited his novels and tales by helping him dramatise his characters thoughts and emotions James produced a small amount of theatrical criticism including appreciations of Henrik Ibsen 76 nb 6 With his wide ranging artistic interests James occasionally wrote on the visual arts He wrote a favourable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent a painter whose critical status has improved markedly since the mid twentieth century James also wrote sometimes charming sometimes brooding articles about various places where he visited and lived His books of travel writing include Italian Hours an example of the charming approach and The American Scene on the brooding side citation needed James was one of the great letter writers of any era More than 10 000 of his personal letters are extant and over 3 000 have been published in a large number of collections A complete edition of James s letters began publication in 2006 edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias As of 2014 update eight volumes have been published covering from 1855 to 1880 77 James s correspondents included contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad along with many others in his wide circle of friends and acquaintances The content of the letters range from trivialities to serious discussions of artistic social and personal issues 78 Very late in life James began a series of autobiographical works A Small Boy and Others Notes of a Son and Brother and the unfinished The Middle Years These books portray the development of a classic observer who was passionately interested in artistic creation but was somewhat reticent about participating fully in the life around him 33 Reception editCriticism biographies and fictional treatments edit nbsp Interior view of Lamb House James s residence from 1897 until 1914 1898 James s work has remained steadily popular with the limited audience of educated readers to whom he spoke during his lifetime and has remained firmly in the canon but after his death some American critics such as Van Wyck Brooks expressed hostility towards James for his long expatriation and eventual naturalisation as a British subject 79 Other critics such as E M Forster complained about what they saw as James s squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly controversial material or dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language 80 Even in his lifetime explains scholar Hazel Hutchinson James had a reputation as a difficult writer for clever readers 81 Oscar Wilde criticised him for writing fiction as if it were a painful duty 82 Vernon Parrington composing a canon of American literature condemned James for having cut himself off from America Jorge Luis Borges wrote about him Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect the absence of life 83 And Virginia Woolf writing to Lytton Strachey asked Please tell me what you find in Henry James we have his works here and I read and I can t find anything but faintly tinged rose water urbane and sleek but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb Is there really any sense in it 84 Novelist W Somerset Maugham wrote He did not know the English as an Englishman instinctively knows them and so his English characters never to my mind quite ring true and argued The great novelists even in seclusion have lived life passionately Henry James was content to observe it from a window 85 Maugham nevertheless wrote The fact remains that those last novels of his notwithstanding their unreality make all other novels except the very best unreadable 86 Colm Toibin observed that James never really wrote about the English very well His English characters don t work for me 87 Despite these criticisms James is now valued for his psychological and moral realism his masterful creation of character his low key but playful humour and his assured command of the language In his 1983 book The Novels of Henry James Edward Wagenknecht offers an assessment that echoes Theodora Bosanquet s To be completely great Henry James wrote in an early review a work of art must lift up the heart and his own novels do this to an outstanding degree More than sixty years after his death the great novelist who sometimes professed to have no opinions stands foursquare in the great Christian humanistic and democratic tradition The men and women who at the height of World War II raided the secondhand shops for his out of print books knew what they were about For no writer ever raised a braver banner to which all who love freedom might adhere 88 William Dean Howells saw James as a representative of a new realist school of literary art which broke with the English romantic tradition epitomised by the works of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray Howells wrote that realism found its chief exemplar in Mr James A novelist he is not after the old fashion or after any fashion but his own 89 F R Leavis championed Henry James as a novelist of established pre eminence in The Great Tradition 1948 asserting that The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were the two most brilliant novels in the language 90 James is now prized as a master of point of view who moved literary fiction forward by insisting in showing not telling his stories to the reader Portrayals in fiction editHenry James has been the subject of a number of novels and stories including 91 Boon by H G Wells Author Author by David Lodge Youth by J M Coetzee The Master by Colm Toibin Hotel de Dream by Edmund White Lions at Lamb House by Edwin M Yoder Felony by Emma Tennant Dictation by Cynthia Ozick The James Boys by Richard Liebmann Smith The Open Door by Elizabeth Maguire The Great Divide by Rex Hunter 92 The Master at St Bartholomew s Hospital 1914 1916 by Joyce Carol Oates The Typewriter s Tale by Michael Heyns Henry James Midnight Song by Carol de Chellis Hill The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess Empire by Gore Vidal The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith Ringrose the Pirate by Don NigroDavid Lodge also wrote a long essay about writing about Henry James in his collection The Year of Henry James The Story of a Novel Adaptations editHenry James stories and novels have been adapted to film television and music video over 150 times some TV shows did upwards of a dozen stories from 1933 to 2018 93 The majority of these are in English but with adaptations in French 13 Spanish 7 Italian 6 German 5 Portuguese 1 Yugoslavian 1 and Swedish 1 93 Those most frequently adapted include The Turn of the Screw 28 times The Aspern Papers 17 times Washington Square 8 times as The Heiress 6 times as Victoria once The Wings of the Dove 9 times The Beast in the Jungle 5 times 94 95 96 97 98 The Bostonians 4 times Daisy Miller 4 times The Sense of the Past 4 times The Ambassadors 3 times The Portrait of a Lady 3 times The American 3 times What Maisie Knew 3 times The Golden Bowl 2 times The Ghostly Rental once Notes edit See e g Cheryl Torsney Constance Fenimore Woolson The Grief of Artistry 1989 Edel s text a convention laden male fantasy See James s prefaces Horne s study of his revisions for The New York Edition Edward Wagenknecht s The Novels of Henry James 1983 among many discussions of the changes in James s narrative technique and style over the course of his career James s prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction often discuss such origins for his stories See for instance the preface to The Spoils of Poynton James himself noted his outsider status In a letter of 2 October 1901 to W Morton Fullerton James talked of the essential loneliness of my life as the deepest thing about him 60 Millicent Bell explores such themes in her monograph Meaning in Henry James For a general discussion of James s efforts as a playwright see Edel s referenced edition of his plays References edit Dr Jack C Wolf Henry James and Impressionist Painting Nomination Database www nobelprize org Archived from the original on 16 July 2017 Henry James Library of America www loa org Retrieved 7 April 2023 Kaplan Fred Henry James The Imagination of Genius A Biography Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press 1992 ISBN missing Leon Edel 1974 Henry James Letters Vol 1 1843 1875 Belknap Press of Harvard University pp 3 4 Letters of William James p 3 The Man Who Talked Like a Book Wrote Like He Spoke PDF Archived PDF from the original on 28 December 2017 a b Powers 1970 p 11 Novick 1996 p 431 Powers 1970 p 12 a b Powers 1970 p 16 Powers 1970 p 14 a b Gamble Cynthia J 2008 John Ruskin Henry James and the Shropshire Lads London New European Publications Gamble Cynthia J 2015 Wenlock Abbey 1857 1919 A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family London Ellingham Press Cowell Frank Richard 1975 The Athenaeum Club and Social Life in London 1824 1974 London Heinemann p 33 ISBN 0 435 32010 6 Ward Humphry 1926 History of the Athenaeum 1824 1925 London p 277 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link Powers 1970 p 15 Gamble Cynthia 2015 Wenlock Abbey 1857 1919 A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family Ellingham Press a b Powers 1970 p 17 Leon Edel 1975 The Letters of Henry James Vol 2 1875 1883 The Belknap Press of Harvard University pp 376 377 Edel 1975 p 379 Edel 1955 p 55 Powers 1970 p 19 Powers 1970 p 20 Letter to Grace Norton 22 Septembre 1890 Quoted in E Harden A Henry James Chronology p 85 Port Tarascon Literary supplement to The Spectator n 3266 31 January 1891 p 147 Powers 1970 p 28 a b Leon Edel 1980 Henry James Letters Vol 3 1883 1895 The Belknap Press of Harvard University p xvii xviii Kaplan chapter 15 Wilson Scott Resting Places The Burial Sites of More Than 14 000 Famous Persons 3d ed 2 Kindle Locations 23458 23459 McFarland amp Company Inc Publishers Kindle Edition Gunter January 2009 Alice in Jamesland The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James U of Nebraska Press p 304 ISBN 978 0803222755 Dupee 1949 clarification needed a b Dupee 1951 Graham Wendy Henry James s Twarted Love Stanford University Press 1999 p 10 a b Leavitt David 23 December 2007 A Beast in the Jungle New York Times Archived from the original on 19 May 2017 Henry James Love Life Slate 24 January 1997 Retrieved 29 May 2021 Leavitt David A Beast in the Jungle The New York Times 23 December 2007 Graham Wendy Henry James s Thwarted Love Bradley John Henry James and Homo Erotic Desire Haralson Eric Henry James and Queer Modernity Anesko Michael Monopolizing the Master Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship Stanford University Press Toibin Colm 20 February 2016 How Henry James s family tried to keep him in the closet The Guardian Archived from the original on 28 May 2017 Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley eds 1994 p 271 Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley eds 1997 William and Henry James Selected Letters The University Press of Virginia p 447 Edel 306 316 clarification needed Zorzi 2004 Gunter amp Jobe 2001 Gunter amp Jobe 2001 p 125 Gunter amp Jobe 2001 p 179 Letters of Henry James to Walter Berry Black Sun Press 1928 Demoor and Chisholm 1999 p 79 Gunter 2000 p 146 Bosanquet 1982 pp 275 276 Guedalla Philip 1921 Supers amp Supermen Studies in Politics History and Letters Archived 25 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine p 45 Alfred A Knopf Retrieved 27 January 2014 Miller James E Jr ed 1972 Theory of Fiction Henry James Archived 2 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine pp 268 69 University of Nebraska Press Retrieved 27 February 2014 Edel Leon ed 1984 Henry James Letters Vol IV 1895 1916 Archived 2 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine p 4 Harvard University Press Retrieved 17 February 2014 Wagenknecht 1983 Woolf March 2003 pp 33 39 40 58 86 215 301 351 Edith Wharton 1925 pp 90 91 H G Wells Boon 1915 p 101 Beerbohm Max 1922 The Mote in the Middle Distance In A Christmas Garland Archived 25 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine p 1 E P Dutton amp Company Retrieved 27 January 2014 a b Leon Edel 1984 volume 4 p 170 Dabney 1983 pp 128 129 The American 1907 p vi vii Kraft 1969 p 68 Brownstein 2004 Hazel Hutchison Brief Lives Henry James London Hesperus Press 2012 The elegiac tone of the novel did not appeal to periodical editors and the novel went straight into book form in 1902 ahead of The Ambassadors which ran in the North American Review from January to December 1903 and was published as a book later that same year Retrieved 1 December 2017 Posnock 1987 p 114 Edel 1990 pp 75 89 Edel 1990 p 121 Novick 2007 pp 15 160 et passim Matthiessen and Murdoch 1981 p 179 Bradley 1999 p 21 n Novick 2007 pp 219 225 et passim Richard Brodhead The School of Hawthorne New York and Oxford Oxford University Press 1986 137 Gordon Fraser Anxiety of Audience Economies of Readership in James s Hawthorne The Henry James Review 34 no 1 2013 1 2 vanden Heuvel 1990 p 5 Wade 1948 pp 243 260 Product Search University of Nebraska Press Archived from the original on 22 February 2014 Retrieved 10 February 2014 Edel 1983 volume 4 p 208 Brooks 1925 Forster 1956 pp 153 163 1 The Conversation Retrieved 10 January 2021 Oscar Wilde Quotes Page 6 BrainyQuote Retrieved 10 August 2011 Borges and de Torres 1971 p 55 Reading Experience Database Display Record Archived 13 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine Can red lec library dal ca Retrieved 10 August 2011 W Somerset Maugham The Vagrant Mood p 203 Maugham op cit p209 Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon in Cambridge 2004 Archived 19 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 7 December 2015 Wagenknecht 1983 pp 261 262 Lauter 2010 p 364 F R Leavis The Great Tradition New York University Press 1969 p 155 Henry James as a fictional character blog loa org Archived from the original on 14 July 2014 Australia Writing Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award 2013 Shortlist Announcement Archived from the original on 5 March 2014 a b Henry James IMDb A Fera na Selva Entrevista exclusiva com Paulo Betti Papo de Cinema in Portuguese 4 October 2017 Oggiano Roberto 31 January 2019 Clara van Gool Director of The Beast in the Jungle Cineuropa Goodfellow Melanie 18 January 2023 The Beast In The Jungle Clip Berlinale Henry James Adaptation Stars Anais Demoustier Tom Mercier amp Beatrice Dalle Deadline Archived from the original on 22 January 2023 Retrieved 22 January 2023 Roos Gautier 25 December 2021 INTERVIEW BERTRAND BONELLO Le grand entretien chaos INTERVIEW BERTRAND BONELLO The Great Chaos Interview Chaos Reign in French Gennis Sadie 10 October 2020 The Haunting of Bly Manor s Henry James References Explained TV Guide Sources editHarold Bloom 2009 2001 Henry James Infobase Publishing originally published by Chelsea House ISBN 978 1 4381 1601 3 Jorge Luis Borges and Esther Zemborain de Torres 1971 An Introduction to American Literature Lexington University Press of Kentucky Theodora Bosanquet 1982 Henry James At Work Haskell House Publishers Inc pp 275 276 ISBN 0 8383 0009 X John R Bradley ed 1999 Henry James and Homo Erotic Desire Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 0 312 21764 1 John R Bradley 2000 I Henry James on Stage and Screen Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 0 333 79214 9 John R Bradley 2000 Henry James s Permanent Adolescence Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 0 333 91874 6 Van Wyck Brooks 1925 The Pilgrimage of Henry James Gabriel Brownstein 2004 Introduction in James Henry Portrait of a Lady Barnes amp Noble Classics series Spark Educational Publishing Lewis Dabney ed 1983 The Portable Edmund Wilson ISBN 0 14 015098 6 Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm editors 1999 Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends Henry James s Letters to Lucy Clifford University of Victoria 1999 p 79 ISBN 0 920604 67 6 F W Dupee 1951 Henry James William Sloane Associates The American Men of Letters Series Leon Edel ed 1955 The Selected Letters of Henry James New York Farrar Straus amp Giroux Vol 1 Leon Edel ed 1983 Henry James Letters Leon Edel ed 1990 The Complete Plays of Henry James New York Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 504379 0 E M Forster 1956 Aspects of the Novel ISBN 0 674 38780 5 Gunter Susan 2000 Dear Munificent Friends Henry James s Letters to Four Women University of Michigan Press ISBN 0 472 11010 1 Gunter Susan E Jobe Steven H 2001 Dearly Beloved Friends Henry James s Letters to Younger Men University of Michigan Press ISBN 0 472 11009 8 Katrina vanden Heuvel 1990 The Nation 1865 1990 Thunder s Mouth Press ISBN 1 56025 001 1 James Kraft 1969 The early tales of Henry James Southern Illinois University Press Paul Lauter 2010 A companion to American literature and culture Chichester Malden MA Wiley Blackwell p 364 ISBN 0 631 20892 5 Percy Lubbock ed 1920 The Letters of Henry James vol 1 New York Scribner F O Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock editors 1981 The Notebooks of Henry James University of Chicago Press ISBN 0 226 51104 9 Novick Sheldon M 1996 Henry James The Young Master Random House ISBN 0 394 58655 7 Sheldon M Novick 2007 Henry James The Mature Master Random House ISBN 978 0 679 45023 8 Ross Posnock 1987 James Browning and the Theatrical Self in Neuman Mark and Payne Michael Self sign and symbol Bucknell University Press Powers Lyall H 1970 Henry James An Introduction and Interpretation New York Holt Rinehart and Winston ISBN 978 0030789557 Ignas Skrupskelis lt and Elizabeth Berkeley editors 1994 The Correspondence of William James Volume 3 William and Henry 1897 1910 Charlottesville University Press of Virginia Allan Wade ed 1948 Henry James The Scenic Art Notes on Acting and the Drama 1872 1901 Edward Wagenknecht 1983 The Novels of Henry James Edith Wharton 1925 The Writing of Fiction Virginia Woolf 2003 A Writer s Diary Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf Harcourt pp 33 39 40 58 86 215 301 351 ISBN 978 0 15 602791 5 H G Wells Boon 1915 The Mind of the Race The Wild Asses of the Devil and The Last Trump London T Fisher Unwin p 101 Rosella Mamoli Zorzi ed 2004 Beloved Boy Letters to Hendrik C Andersen 1899 1915 University of Virginia Press ISBN 0 8139 2270 4Further reading editGeneral edit A Bibliography of Henry James Third Edition by Leon Edel Dan Laurence and James Rambeau 1982 ISBN 1 58456 005 3 A Henry James Encyclopedia by Robert L Gale 1989 ISBN 0 313 25846 5 A Henry James Chronology by Edgar F Harden 2005 ISBN 1403942293 The Daily Henry James A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master Edited by Michael Gorra 2016 ISBN 978 0 226 40854 5 Henry James A Bibliographical Catalogue of Editions to 1921 2nd Edition Revised By David J Supino Liverpool U Press 2014Autobiography edit A Small Boy and Others A Critical Edition edited by Peter Collister 2011 ISBN 0813930820 Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years A Critical Edition edited by Peter Collister 2011 ISBN 0813930847 Autobiographies edited by Philip Horne 2016 Contains A Small Boy and Others Notes of a Son and Brother The Middle Years other autobiographical writings and Henry James at Work by Theodora Bosanquet ISBN 978 1598534719Bibliography edit An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James by Nicola Bradbury Harvester Press 1987 ISBN 978 0710810304Biography edit Henry James The Untried Years 1843 1870 by Leon Edel 1953 Henry James The Conquest of London 1870 1881 by Leon Edel 1962 ISBN 0 380 39651 3 Henry James The Middle Years 1882 1895 by Leon Edel 1962 ISBN 0 380 39669 6 Henry James The Treacherous Years 1895 1901 by Leon Edel 1969 ISBN 0 380 39677 7 Henry James The Master 1901 1916 by Leon Edel 1972 ISBN 0 380 39677 7 Henry James A Life by Leon Edel 1985 ISBN 0060154594 One volume abridgment of Edel s five volume biography listed above Henry James The Young Master by Sheldon M Novick 1996 ISBN 0812978838 Henry James The Mature Master by Sheldon M Novick 2007 ISBN 0679450238 Henry James The Imagination of Genius by Fred Kaplan 1992 ISBN 0 688 09021 4 A Private Life of Henry James Two Women and His Art by Lyndall Gordon 1998 ISBN 0 393 04711 3 Revised edition titled Henry James His Women and His Art 2012 ISBN 978 1 84408 892 8 The Three Jameses A Family of Minds Henry James Sr William James Henry James by Clinton Hartley Grattan 1932 The James Family A Group Biography by F O Matthiessen 1947 0394742435 ISBN 0679450238 The Jameses A Family Narrative by R W B Lewis 1991 ISBN 0374178615 House of Wits An Intimate Portrait of the James Family by Paul Fisher 2008 ISBN 1616793376Letters edit Theatre and Friendship by Elizabeth Robins London Jonathan Cape 1932 Henry James Letters edited by Leon Edel four vols 1974 1984 Henry James A Life in Letters edited by Philip Horne 1999 ISBN 0 670 88563 0 The Complete Letters of Henry James 1855 1872 edited by Pierre A Walker and Greg Zacharias two vols University of Nebraska Press 2006 The Complete Letters of Henry James 1872 1876 edited by Pierre A Walker and Greg W Zacharias three vols University of Nebraska Press 2008 Editions edit Complete Stories 1864 1874 Jean Strouse ed Library of America 1999 ISBN 978 1 883011 70 3 Complete Stories 1874 1884 William Vance ed Library of America 1999 ISBN 978 1 883011 63 5 Complete Stories 1884 1891 Edward Said ed Library of America 1999 ISBN 978 1 883011 64 2 Complete Stories 1892 1898 John Hollander David Bromwich Denis Donoghue eds Library of America 1996 ISBN 978 1 883011 09 3 Complete Stories 1898 1910 John Hollander David Bromwich Denis Donoghue eds Library of America 1996 ISBN 978 1 883011 10 9 Novels 1871 1880 Watch and Ward Roderick Hudson The American The Europeans Confidence William T Stafford ed Library of America 1983 ISBN 978 0 940450 13 4 Novels 1881 1886 Washington Square The Portrait of a Lady The Bostonians William T Stafford ed Library of America 1985 ISBN 978 0 940450 30 1 Novels 1886 1890 The Princess Casamassima The Reverberator The Tragic Muse Daniel Mark Fogel ed Library of America 1989 ISBN 978 0 940450 56 1 Novels 1896 1899 The Other House The Spoils of Poynton What Maisie Knew The Awkward Age Myra Jehlen ed Library of America 2003 ISBN 978 1 931082 30 3 Novels 1901 1902 The Sacred Fount The Wings of the Dove Leo Bersani ed Library of America 2006 ISBN 978 1 931082 88 4 Collected Travel Writings Great Britain and America English Hours The American Scene Other Travels edited by Richard Howard Library of America 1993 ISBN 978 0 940450 76 9 Collected Travel Writings The Continent A Little Tour in France Italian Hours Other Travels edited by Richard Howard Library of America 1993 ISBN 0 940450 77 1 Literary Criticism Volume One Essays on Literature American Writers English Writers edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson Library of America 1984 ISBN 978 0 940450 22 6 Literary Criticism Volume Two French Writers Other European Writers The Prefaces to the New York Edition edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson Library of America 1984 ISBN 978 0 940450 23 3 The Complete Notebooks of Henry James edited by Leon Edel and Lyall Powers 1987 ISBN 0 19 503782 0 The Complete Plays of Henry James edited by Leon Edel 1991 ISBN 0195043790 Henry James Autobiography edited by F W Dupee 1956 The American an Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism edited by James Tuttleton 1978 ISBN 0 393 09091 4 The Ambassadors An Authoritative Text The Author on the Novel Criticism edited by S P Rosenbaum 1994 ISBN 0 393 96314 4 The Turn of the Screw Authoritative Text Contexts Criticism edited by Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren 1999 ISBN 0 393 95904 X The Portrait of a Lady An Authoritative Text Henry James and the Novel Reviews and Criticism edited by Robert Bamberg 2003 ISBN 0 393 96646 1 The Wings of the Dove Authoritative Text The Author and the Novel Criticism edited by J Donald Crowley and Richard Hocks 2003 ISBN 0 393 97881 8 Tales of Henry James The Texts of the Tales the Author on His Craft Criticism edited by Christof Wegelin and Henry Wonham 2003 ISBN 0 393 97710 2 The Portable Henry James New Edition edited by John Auchard 2004 ISBN 0 14 243767 0 Henry James on Culture Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene edited by Pierre Walker 1999 ISBN 0 8032 2589 XCriticism edit The Novels of Henry James by Oscar Cargill 1961 Henry James the later novels by Nicola Bradbury Oxford Clarendon Press 1979 The Tales of Henry James by Edward Wagenknecht 1984 ISBN 0 8044 2957 X Modern Critical Views Henry James edited by Harold Bloom 1987 ISBN 0 87754 696 7 Henry James The Contingencies of Style by Mary Cross 1993 ISBN 0 333 57426 5 A Companion to Henry James Studies edited by Daniel Mark Fogel 1993 ISBN 0 313 25792 2 Henry James s Europe Heritage and Transfer edited by Dennis Tredy Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding 2011 ISBN 978 1 906924 36 2 Echec et ecriture Essai sur les nouvelles de Henry James by Annick Duperray 1992 Henry James A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Ruth Yeazell 1994 ISBN 0 13 380973 0 The Cambridge Companion to Henry James edited by Jonathan Freedman 1998 ISBN 0 521 49924 0 The Novel Art Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James by Mark McGurl 2001 ISBN 0 691 08899 3 Henry James and the Visual by Kendall Johnson 2007 ISBN 0 521 88066 1 False Positions The Representational Logics of Henry James s Fiction by Julie Rivkin 1996 ISBN 0 8047 2617 5 Henry James s Critique of the Beautiful Life by R R Reno in Azure Spring 2010 2 Approaches to Teaching Henry James s Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw edited by Kimberly C Reed and Peter G Beidler 2005 ISBN 0 87352 921 9 Henry James and Modern Moral Life by Robert B Pippin 1999 ISBN 0 521 65230 8 Friction with the Market Henry James and the Profession of Authorship by Michael Anesko 1986 ISBN 0 19 504034 1External links editHenry James at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Quotations from Wikiquote nbsp Texts from Wikisource nbsp Data from Wikidata Henry James Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Henry James Collection at the Harry Ransom Center Henry James Letters at Columbia University The Henry James Scholar s Guide to Web Sites The Ladder a Henry James Web Site archived Henry James Archive Mantex Henry James at IMDbElectronic editions edit Works by Henry James in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by Henry James at Project Gutenberg Works by Henry James at Faded Page Canada Works by or about Henry James at Internet Archive Works by Henry James at LibriVox public domain audiobooks nbsp Works by Henry James at Open Library The Henry James Collection From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Henry James amp oldid 1187802057, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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