Henry James

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry James was born on the 15th of April 1843 at 21 Washington Place in Manhattan, into a family that would produce two other towering figures in American thought: his brother William, who became a philosopher and psychologist, and his sister Alice, who left behind a celebrated diary. What makes James extraordinary is not simply that he wrote novels, but that he occupied a rare position between two literary worlds. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, a writer whose late works were compared by critics to Impressionist painting. He spent most of his life in Europe, eventually becoming a British citizen in 1915, just a year before his death. Jorge Luis Borges, having read widely across Eastern and Western literatures, said of him: "I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James." So what made James so strange, so difficult, and so enduring? The answer lies in a restless Atlantic life, a family shaped by wealth and eccentricity, and a prose style that pushed the novel toward something no one had quite attempted before.

• 2. The James Family World

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  The family fortune that made Henry's unusual upbringing possible traced back to his grandfather, also named William James, a farmer from Corkish, County Cavan in Ireland who emigrated to Albany, New York. That grandfather became the second richest man in the state of New York, after John Jacob Astor, through banking and real estate. Henry Sr., the writer's father, inherited independent means from this fortune and used them to pursue philosophy and theology as a gentleman intellectual, hiring tutors for his children rather than settling them in conventional schools. Percy Lubbock, the editor of James's selected letters, described the resulting education as "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous."

  Before Henry Jr. was a year old, the family left New York for Europe. They moved through London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Bonn between 1855 and 1860, following the father's publishing ventures and intellectual enthusiasms, and retreating to America only when funds ran low. In Paris, the family arrived in July 1855 and took rooms in the Rue de la Paix. Henry began to feel genuinely at home in France, becoming fluent in French, and his stutter, which appeared when he spoke English, did not surface in French at all.

  One afternoon in Boulogne-sur-Mer in the summer of 1857, Henry Senior wrote to a friend that Henry Jr. was "a devourer of libraries, and an immense writer of novels and dramas." The father added, with mild puzzlement, that he was "at a loss to know whether he will ever accomplish much." A painting of Florence by Thomas Cole hung in the front parlor of the family's house on West Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, and a cousin once read the first installment of David Copperfield aloud to the family; young Henry had crept downstairs to listen secretly and sobbed so loudly at a scene involving the Murdstones that he was discovered and sent back to bed.

• 3. Balzac, Boston, and First Words

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  John La Farge, the painter for whom Henry sat as a subject after the family returned to Newport in 1860, introduced him to French literature and in particular to Balzac. James later called Balzac his "greatest master" and credited him with teaching more about the craft of fiction than anyone else. That same period brought a friendship with Thomas Sergeant Perry, who became a celebrated literary academic, and the two men visited an encampment of wounded Union soldiers on the Rhode Island shore at Portsmouth Grove in July 1861.

  In the autumn of 1861, James received an injury, probably to his back, while fighting a fire. The injury recurred throughout his life and rendered him unfit for service in the Civil War, though his younger brothers Garth Wilkinson and Robertson both served; Garth Wilkinson held an officer's commission in the 54th Massachusetts regiment. James's first published piece appeared in 1863: a review of a stage performance titled "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket." His first short story, "A Tragedy of Error," appeared anonymously about a year later, and his first literary payment came from an appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's novels written for the North American Review.

  By 1865, James had become connected to Ernest Lawrence Godkin, founder of The Nation, who visited the family at their Boston residence in Ashburton Place to solicit contributions for the journal's inaugural issue. James later described his friendship with Godkin as "one of the longest and happiest of my life." That same year, Louisa May Alcott dined with the James family in Boston and recorded in her journals that Henry Jr., very friendly and playing the elder literary sage despite his youth, gave her advice "as if he had been eighty, and I a girl." James also formed lifelong friendships in Boston and Cambridge with William Dean Howells, Charles Eliot Norton, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice.

• 4. Paris, London, and the Literary Apprenticeship

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  During a fourteen-month journey through Europe in 1869-70, James met John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and George Eliot. Rome affected him profoundly. "Here I am then in the Eternal City," he wrote to William. "At last -- for the first time -- I live!" He tried to sustain himself as a freelance writer in Rome, then secured a position as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune through the influence of its editor, John Hay. When that arrangement failed he returned briefly to New York.

  In 1875, James wrote for The Nation every week, earning anywhere from three to ten dollars for brief paragraphs, twelve to twenty-five for book reviews, and twenty-five to forty dollars for travel articles. In the fall of that year he moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, where he met Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and Turgenev. 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 later published in book form. The audience for these serialized novels was largely middle-class women, and James struggled to write serious literary work within constraints imposed by editors' views of what was suitable for young women to read.

  Henry Adams and Charles Milnes Gaskell introduced him to English society; Gaskell specifically brought him into the Travellers' and Reform Clubs. He also became an honorary member of the Savile Club, the St. James's Club, and in 1882 the Athenaeum Club. In 1877, James first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, the home of Gaskell, and the gloomy monastic fishponds behind the abbey are said to have inspired the lake in The Turn of the Screw. Daisy Miller in 1878 established his fame on both sides of the Atlantic by depicting a woman whose behavior falls outside European social norms. By 1881, he had completed The Portrait of a Lady, the work generally considered the masterpiece of his first period.

• 5. The Theatre Gamble

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  The poor critical reception and weak sales of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima in 1886 pushed James toward the theatre. He wrote to Howells that those books had "reduced the desire, and demand, for my productions to zero." From 1890 to 1892, having received a bequest that freed him from magazine work, he made a strenuous effort on the London stage and wrote about half a dozen plays, of which only a dramatization of his novel The American was produced. That play ran for several years with a touring repertory company and had a respectable London run, but it did not earn much money.

  In 1893, actor-manager George Alexander commissioned a serious play for the reopening of his renovated St. James's Theatre. James wrote Guy Domville, a long costume drama, and Alexander produced it. On the opening night, the 5th of January 1895, hissing broke out from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain. The play received moderately good reviews and ran for four weeks before making way for Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which Alexander judged more commercially promising. James was shaken.

  Biographer Leon Edel argued that the opening-night uproar traumatized James and pushed him into prolonged depression. F. O. Matthiessen offered the opposite reading: far from being crushed, James felt "a resurgence of new energy." James himself wrote in his Notebooks that the theatrical experiment had benefited his novels by teaching him to dramatize his characters' thoughts and emotions from the inside. He recycled his unproduced plays as fiction; The Outcry became a best-seller in the United States when published in 1911. He also made a substantial contribution to London's theatre during this period by assisting Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time in London.

• 6. The Late Style and Its Discontents

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  The three novels that critic F. O. Matthiessen called James's "major phase" appeared in rapid succession: The Wings of the Dove in 1902, The Ambassadors in 1903, and The Golden Bowl in 1904. These books were increasingly experimental, written in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed. Single paragraphs ran for page after page; an initial noun would be followed by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, with verbs deferred and preceded by a series of adverbs. Scholars have debated whether this transformation was triggered by James's shift from writing longhand to dictating to a typist, a change made during the composition of What Maisie Knew.

  H. G. Wells, who had admired James greatly, harshly compared him to a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that had got into a corner of its cage. His friend Edith Wharton said that some passages were all but incomprehensible. Virginia Woolf, writing to Lytton Strachey, called his writing "faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale." W. Somerset Maugham wrote that James "was content to observe it from a window," yet Maugham also conceded that the late novels made "all other novels, except the very best, unreadable."

  James may have anticipated some of this divide. In his prefaces to the 24-volume New York Edition, which he assembled and edited in 1906-1910, he subjected his own fiction to searching and occasionally harsh criticism. Oscar Wilde offered the sharpest single-line verdict, accusing James of writing "fiction as if it were a painful duty." What no critic could dispute was that James had foreshadowed stream-of-consciousness fiction; Virginia Woolf, who dismissed him privately, read several of his novels and wrote essays about them, and scholars have noted his influence on her own technique.

• 7. Private Life, Letters, and Legacy

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  James wrote more than 10,000 personal letters over his lifetime, of which over 3,000 have been published. His correspondents included Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, and Joseph Conrad, and the letters range from trivial remarks to serious discussions of art and personal feeling. His letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen, whom he met in Rome in 1899 when James was fifty-six and Andersen was twenty-seven, are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me -- in every throb of your soul." To his friend Howard Sturgis he wrote: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you."

  Debate over what these letters reveal has divided Jamesian scholars for decades. Between 1953 and 1972, Leon Edel published a five-volume biography that portrayed James as celibate, a view Edel traced back to critic Saul Rosenzweig writing in 1943. In 1996, Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James: The Young Master challenged that received interpretation directly. Novick argued that the celibacy paradigm had been routinely applied to homosexual subjects in cases where direct evidence was absent, and he criticized Edel for treating homosexuality as a kind of failure. The resulting dispute was played out in a series of exchanges published in the online magazine Slate. Colm Tóibín later credited Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet with making a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that James's desire to keep his sexuality private shaped his layered style and dramatic artistry.

  James became a British citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit that same year, and died on the 28th of February 1916 in Chelsea, London. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. He had wished his ashes buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts, which proved legally impossible; William's wife smuggled them aboard a ship and through customs so he could be buried in the family plot. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. His stories and novels have been adapted to film and television over 150 times between 1933 and 2018, with The Turn of the Screw alone adapted twenty-eight times, making it by far his most translated work into other media.