Henry James

Henry James was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, into one of the most intellectually restless families in nineteenth century America ^[1]. His father, Henry James Sr., was a theological writer and lecturer who had inherited enough money to avoid a profession and who devoted his life to Swedenborgian religious thought and to the education of his children. His elder brother, William James, became the philosopher and psychologist whose work on the stream of consciousness would later echo, in a curious family symmetry, the novelist's own experiments in narrating the mind ^[2].

The James children grew up in transit. Their father distrusted conventional schooling and hauled the family back and forth across the Atlantic, so young Henry studied with tutors and in schools in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne, and Bonn before he turned seventeen ^[1]. The result was a boy fluent in French, saturated in European galleries and theaters, and permanently detached from any single national habit of mind. He later described himself in his memoirs as a small watcher, a child who absorbed scenes rather than joined them ^[3].

An injury sustained while helping to fight a fire in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1861, an event he called an obscure hurt, kept him out of the American Civil War, in which two of his younger brothers served ^[2]. He entered Harvard Law School in 1862 but lasted barely a year. Law held no interest for him. Fiction did, and by 1864 he had published his first story anonymously and begun reviewing books for the North American Review and the Nation ^[1].

Through the late 1860s James built a reputation as a critic and writer of short fiction for the Atlantic Monthly, whose editor William Dean Howells became an early champion and lifelong friend ^[2]. His first novel, Watch and Ward, ran serially in 1871, but James himself came to regard Roderick Hudson (1875), the story of an American sculptor undone in Rome, as his true beginning ^[1].

The decisive step came in 1875, when James left the United States for good. After a year in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola, he settled in London in 1876 ^[2]. Europe gave him his great subject. In The American (1877) a self-made businessman named Christopher Newman collides with the closed world of the French aristocracy, and in the short novel Daisy Miller (1878) a spirited American girl scandalizes expatriate society in Rome. Daisy Miller made James famous on both sides of the Atlantic and fixed the pattern that critics would call his international theme: the moral drama produced when American openness meets European convention ^[4].

The first phase of his career culminated in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the study of Isabel Archer, a young American woman whose inheritance and independence deliver her into a suffocating marriage. Many readers and scholars regard it as the finest novel of his early period, and it remains the work through which most people first encounter a Henry James biography ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Henry James usually arrives at a career conventionally divided into three phases. After the early international novels came a middle period in the 1880s devoted to social and political subjects: The Bostonians (1886), a satirical look at reformers and the women's movement in New England, and The Princess Casamassima (1886), which follows a London bookbinder drawn into revolutionary politics ^[4]. Neither sold well, and in the 1890s James gambled on the theater. The gamble failed publicly and painfully when he was booed at the premiere of his play Guy Domville in London in 1895 ^[2].

The theatrical defeat proved productive. James returned to fiction with a sharpened sense of scenic construction and produced the experimental works of the later 1890s, including What Maisie Knew (1897), told through the limited understanding of a child of divorce, and The Turn of the Screw (1898), a ghost story whose ambiguity, is the governess haunted or deluded, has kept critics arguing for more than a century ^[4].

His final phase brought the three dense late novels on which much of his standing rests: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), which James considered his best work, and The Golden Bowl (1904) ^[1]. Between 1907 and 1909 he revised his fiction for the twenty four volume New York Edition, adding the prefaces that became founding documents of modern novel criticism ^[5]. Among Henry James achievements, this body of theory matters almost as much as the fiction: his insistence on a controlling point of view, dramatized consciousness, and the novel as a deliberate art shaped writers and critics throughout the twentieth century ^[5].

James never married. He guarded his privacy closely and near the end of his life burned forty years of accumulated letters and papers at his home in Rye, an act that has frustrated biographers ever since ^[2]. His emotional life has been the subject of sustained scholarly discussion. Leon Edel's five volume biography, published between 1953 and 1972, and later studies have examined his intense attachments, including his correspondence with younger men such as the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, though how James understood or acted on these feelings remains a matter of interpretation rather than record ^[6].

What is documented is an enormous social appetite joined to a solitary working discipline. During one London winter he claimed to have dined out more than a hundred times, and his circle included Robert Browning, George Eliot, Edmund Gosse, and later Edith Wharton, who became a close friend and occasional traveling companion ^[2]. He was equally devoted to his family, above all to William, with whom he kept up a lifelong, competitive, affectionate correspondence, and to his sister Alice, an invalid whose posthumously published diary is now read as a significant work in its own right ^[3].

In 1897 James left London for Lamb House, an eighteenth century brick house in the Sussex town of Rye, where he wrote his late masterpieces, dictating to a typist after writer's cramp made longhand difficult ^[7]. The house is now in the care of the National Trust and is open to visitors ^[7].

In 1904 and 1905 James returned to the United States for the first time in more than twenty years, touring from New England to Florida and California. The visit produced The American Scene (1907), a searching and often unsettled account of a country transformed by immigration, money, and skyscrapers ^[1]. Back in England he turned to autobiography, publishing A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914); a third volume, The Middle Years, appeared unfinished after his death ^[3].

The First World War shook him profoundly. He threw himself into war charities, visited wounded soldiers in London hospitals, and chaired the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps ^[2]. Frustrated that the United States remained neutral, he took British citizenship in July 1915 as a declaration of allegiance to his adopted country ^[1]. King George V awarded him the Order of Merit in the New Year honours of 1916 ^[2].

James suffered a stroke in December 1915 and died at his flat in Chelsea, London, on February 28, 1916, at the age of seventy two ^[1]. After a funeral at Chelsea Old Church his body was cremated and his ashes were taken to the family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1976 a memorial stone was dedicated in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey ^[8].

Few writers have had a stranger afterlife. James's sales in his lifetime were modest, and the late style, with its long qualifying sentences, baffled many contemporaries. Yet by the mid twentieth century critics such as F. R. Leavis had placed him at the center of what Leavis called the great tradition of the English novel, and academic interest, sometimes labeled the James revival, made him one of the most studied authors in the language ^[4]. His prefaces and his 1884 essay The Art of Fiction remain standard reading in the theory of the novel, and his handling of restricted point of view prepared the ground for modernists from Joseph Conrad, who called him the historian of fine consciences, to Virginia Woolf ^[5].

His stories have proved unusually adaptable. The Turn of the Screw became Benjamin Britten's 1954 opera and repeated film and television versions; Washington Square was filmed as The Heiress in 1949; and the 1990s brought a wave of screen adaptations including The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and The Wings of the Dove (1997) ^[4]. Novelists have kept turning him into a character as well, most visibly in 2004, when Colm Toibin's The Master and David Lodge's Author, Author fictionalized his life in the same year ^[6].

Among the basic Henry James facts, one carries the most weight: across twenty novels, more than a hundred stories, plays, travel books, and criticism, he treated the novel as a serious instrument for examining how people perceive, misread, and use one another ^[1]. That claim for fiction as an art, argued in essays and demonstrated on every page, is the reason readers still work through his sentences a century after his death.