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Henry James

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   CAPTION: Henry James

   Henry James in 1890
         Born:        April 15, 1843
                      New York City
         Died:        February 28, 1916
                      London
     Occupation(s):   Novelist
       Genre(s):      Novel, Novella, Short Story
   Literary movement: Realism,
                      Psychological Realism
      Influences:     Nathaniel Hawthorne
                      Honoré de Balzac
                      Ivan Turgenev
      Influenced:     Edith Wharton
                      Louis Auchincloss
                      Colm Tóibín
        Website:      The Henry James Scholar's Guide to Web Sites

   Henry James, OM ( April 15, 1843 – February 28, 1916), son of Henry
   James Sr. and brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James
   and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author and literary
   critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his
   life in Europe and became a British subject shortly before his death.
   He is primarily known for novels, novellas and short stories based on
   themes of consciousness and morality.

   James significantly contributed to the criticism of fiction,
   particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest
   freedom possible in presenting their view of the world. His imaginative
   use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable
   narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest
   to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, he
   published substantive books of travel writing, biography, autobiography
   and visual arts criticism.

Life

   Henry James at eight years old with his father, Henry James, Sr. — 1854
   daguerreotype by Mathew Brady
   Henry James at eight years old with his father, Henry James, Sr. — 1854
   daguerreotype by Mathew Brady

   Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy, intellectually
   inclined family. His father, Henry James Sr., was interested in various
   religious and literary pursuits. In his youth, James travelled with his
   family back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with
   tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, and Bonn. At the age of 19, he briefly
   and unsuccessfully attended Harvard Law School, but he much preferred
   reading and writing fiction to studying law.

   From an early age James read, criticized, and learned from the classics
   of English, American, French, Italian, German and (in translation)
   Russian literature. In 1864, he anonymously published his first short
   story, A Tragedy of Error, and from then on devoted himself completely
   to literature. Throughout his career, he contributed extensively to
   magazines such as The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and
   Scribner's. From 1875 to his death, he maintained a strenuous schedule
   of book publication in a variety of genres: novels, short story
   collections, literary criticism, travel writing, biography and
   autobiography.

   In all, he wrote 22 novels, including two left unfinished at his death,
   and 112 tales of varying lengths, along with many plays and a large
   number of non-fiction essays and books. Among the writers most
   influential on James's fiction were Nathaniel Hawthorne, with his
   emphasis on the ambiguities of human choice and the universality of
   guilt, Honoré de Balzac, with his careful attention to detail and
   realistic presentation of character, and Ivan Turgenev, with his
   dislike for over-elaborate plotting.

   James never married, and it is an unresolved (and perhaps irresolvable)
   question as to whether he ever experienced a consummated sexual
   relationship. Many of his letters are filled with expressions of
   affection towards men and women, but it has never been shown
   conclusively that any of these expressions were acted out. To his
   effeminate friend Howard Overing Sturgis, for example, James could
   write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you.
   Meanwhile I can only try to live without you." Similarly, James wrote
   to his longtime friend and 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." In another example of James' sometimes emotional
   epistolary style, he wrote to his New York friend Mary Cadwalader
   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' pet name for James] has
   "done" anything, in some dark somnabulism 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. matutional intimes hours, those telephonic
   matinees, as the most romantic of his life..."

   James enjoyed socializing with his many friends and acquaintances, but
   he seems to have maintained a certain distance from other people. 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
   Leon Edel's biography and play a central role in the more recent
   biography by Lyndall Gordon. (See the footnotes for further details on
   all the published biographies of James.) Once again, the exact nature
   of the relationship is unclear and may never be clarified. Many modern
   critics and biographers have speculated that James was most likely a
   repressed homosexual, as author Terry Eagleton has stated: "...as gay
   critics debate exactly how repressed his (probable) homosexuality
   was..." But the sources listed in the footnotes illustrate that James'
   sexuality remains a contentious issue with no certainty on the subject
   among critics and biographers, which explains the qualifying "probable"
   in Eagleton's opinion.

   After a brief attempt to live in Paris, James moved permanently to
   England in 1876. He settled first in a London apartment and then, from
   1897 on, in Lamb House, a historic residence in Rye, East Sussex. In
   1899 when James was 56, he met in Rome the 27-year-old American
   sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen, with whom he appears to have
   fallen in love, resulting in letters to Andersen that are emotional and
   occasionally erotic: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, &
   count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul"; "I put, my dear
   boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of
   our excellent future & your admirable endowment." Again, the exact
   nature of James' relationship with Andersen may never be known with
   certainty.

   James revisited America on several occasions, most notably in 1904–05.
   The outbreak of World War I was a profound shock for James, and in
   1915, he became a British citizen to declare his loyalty to his adopted
   country as well as to protest America's refusal to enter the war on
   behalf of Britain. James suffered a stroke in London on December 2,
   1915 and died three months later.

Style and themes

   "Portrait of Henry James," charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent
   (1911)
   Enlarge
   "Portrait of Henry James," charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent
   (1911)

   James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His
   works frequently juxtapose characters from different worlds—the Old
   World (Europe), simultaneously artistic, corrupting, and alluring; and
   the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and
   assertive—and explore how this clash of personalities and cultures
   affects the two worlds.

   He favored internal, psychological drama, and his work is often about
   conflicts between imaginative protagonists and their difficult
   environments. As his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her
   monograph Henry James at Work:

          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.

   His earlier work is considered realist because of the carefully
   described details of his characters' physical surroundings. However,
   throughout his long career, James maintained a strong interest in a
   variety of artistic effects and movements. His work gradually became
   more metaphorical and symbolic as he entered more deeply into the minds
   of his characters. In its intense focus on the consciousness of his
   major characters, James's later work foreshadows extensive developments
   in 20th century fiction.

   The prose of James's later works is frequently marked by long,
   digressive sentences that defer the verb and include many qualifying
   adverbs, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. James seemed
   to change from a fairly straightforward style in his earlier writing to
   a more elaborate manner in his later works. Biographers have noted that
   the change of style occurred at approximately the time that James began
   dictating his fiction to a secretary.

   Henry James was afflicted with a mild stutter; he overcame this by
   cultivating the habit of speaking very slowly and deliberately. Since
   he believed that good writing should resemble the conversation of an
   intelligent man, the process of dictating his works may perhaps account
   for a shift in style from direct to conversational sentences. The
   resulting prose style is at times baroque. His friend Edith Wharton,
   who admired him greatly, said that there were some passages in his
   works that were all but incomprehensible. His short fiction, such as
   The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw, is often considered to be
   more readable than the longer novels, and his early works tend to be
   more accessible than his later ones.

   The Turn of the Screw, however, is itself one of James's later works.
   Generalizations about the "accessibility" of James's fiction are
   difficult, at best. Many of his later short stories—" Europe", " Paste"
   and " Mrs. Medwin", for instance—are briefer and more straightforward
   in style than some tales of his earlier years.

   For much of his life James was an expatriate, an outsider, living in
   Europe. Much of The Portrait of a Lady was written while he lived in
   Venice, a city whose beauty he found distracting; he was better pleased
   with the small town of Rye in England. This feeling of being an
   American in Europe came through as a recurring theme in his books,
   which contrasted American innocence (or lack of sophistication) with
   European sophistication (or decadence)—see, for example, The Portrait
   of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

   He made only a modest living from his books, yet was often the
   houseguest of the wealthy. James had grown up in a well-to-do family,
   and he was able to enter into this world for many of the impressions
   and observations he would eventually include in his fiction. (He said
   he got some of his best story ideas from dinner table gossip.) He was a
   man whose sexuality was uncertain and whose tastes and interests were,
   according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American
   culture, rather feminine. William Faulkner once referred to James as
   "the nicest old lady I ever met." In a similar vein, Thomas Hardy
   called James and Robert Louis Stevenson "virtuous females" when he read
   their unfavorable comments about Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Percy
   Lubbock's 1920 collection of James's letters. Theodore Roosevelt also
   criticized James for his supposed lack of masculinity. When James
   toured America in 1904–1905, he met Roosevelt—whom James dubbed
   "Theodore Rex" and called "a dangerous and ominous jingo"—at a White
   House dinner. Oddly, the two men chatted amicably and at length, as if
   they were the best of friends.

   It is often asserted that James's being a permanent outsider in so many
   ways may have helped him in his detailed psychological analysis of
   situations—one of the strongest features of his writing. He was never a
   full member of any camp. (See The Princess Casamassima, especially the
   Princess's comment that Hyacinth is doomed to looking at the world
   through a sheet of glass.) In his review of Van Wyck Brooks' The
   Pilgrimage of Henry James, critic Edmund Wilson noted James's detached,
   objective viewpoint and made a startling comparison:

          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.

   It is possible to see many of James's stories as psychological
   thought-experiments. The Portrait of a Lady may be an experiment to see
   what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich;
   alternatively, it has been suggested that the storyline was inspired by
   Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection. The novella The Turn of
   the Screw describes the psychological history of an unmarried (and,
   some critics suggest, sexually repressed and possibly unbalanced) young
   governess. The unnamed governess stumbles into a terrifying, ambiguous
   situation involving her perceptions of the ghosts of a lately deceased
   couple—her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel's lover, Peter
   Quint.

Major novels

   "Portrait of Henry James," oil painting by John Singer Sargent (1913)
   Enlarge
   "Portrait of Henry James," oil painting by John Singer Sargent (1913)

   Although any selection of James's novels as "major" must inevitably
   depend to some extent on personal preference, the following books have
   achieved prominence among his works in the views of many critics.

   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
   bildungsroman 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 favorable comment due to the vivid realization
   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.

   Although Roderick Hudson featured mostly American characters in a
   European setting, James made the Europe–America contrast even more
   explicit in his next novel. In fact, the contrast could be considered
   the leading theme of The American (1877). This book is a combination of
   social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures
   of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche
   American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for
   a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th century
   American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of
   Europe, and learns not to take either for granted.

   James did not set all of his novels in Europe or focus exclusively on
   the contrast between the New World and the Old. Set in New York City,
   Washington Square (1880) is a deceptively simple tragicomedy that
   recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her
   brilliant, domineering father. The book is often compared to Jane
   Austen's work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense
   focus on family relationships. James was not particularly enthusiastic
   about Jane Austen, so he might not have regarded the comparison as
   flattering. In fact, James was not enthusiastic about Washington Square
   itself. He tried to read it over for inclusion in the New York Edition
   of his fiction (1907–09) but found that he could not. So he excluded
   the novel from the edition. But other readers have enjoyed the book
   enough to make it one of the more popular works in the entire Jamesian
   canon.

   In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James concluded the first phase of his
   career with a novel that remains to this day his most popular long
   fiction, if the Amazon sales rankings are any indication. This
   impressive achievement is the story 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, Portrait of a
   Lady is not just a reflection of James's absorbing interest in the
   differences between the New World and the Old, but a profound
   meditation on the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal,
   and sexuality.

   In the 1880s James began to explore new areas of interest besides the
   Europe–America contrast and the "American girl". In particular, he
   began writing on explicitly political themes. The Bostonians (1886) is
   a bittersweet tragicomedy that centers on an odd triangle of
   characters: Basil Ransom, an unbending political conservative from
   Mississippi; Olive Chancellor, Ransom's cousin and a zealous Boston
   feminist; and Verena Tarrant, a pretty protege of Olive's in the
   feminist movement. The story line concerns the contest between Ransom
   and Olive for Verena's allegiance and affection, though the novel also
   includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and
   quirky eccentrics.

   The political theme turned darker in The Princess Casamassima (1886),
   the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder,
   Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in far left politics and a
   terrorist assassination plot. The book is something of a lone sport in
   the Jamesian canon for dealing with such a violent political subject.
   But it is often paired with The Bostonians, which is concerned with
   political issues in a less tragic manner.

   Just as James was beginning his ultimately disastrous attempt to
   conquer the stage, he wrote The Tragic Muse (1890). This novel offers a
   wide, cheerful panorama of English life and follows the fortunes of two
   would-be artists: Nick Dormer, who vacillates between a political
   career and his efforts to become a painter, and Miriam Rooth, an
   actress striving for artistic and commercial success. A huge cast of
   supporting characters help and hinder their pursuits. The book reflects
   James's consuming interest in the theatre and is often considered to
   mark the close of the second or middle phase of his career in the
   novel.

   After the failure of his "dramatic experiment" James returned to his
   fiction with a deeper, more incisive approach. He began to probe his
   characters' consciousness in a more insightful manner, which had been
   foreshadowed in such passages as Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady.
   His style also started to grow in complexity to reflect the greater
   depth of his analysis. The Spoils of Poynton (1897), considered the
   first example of this final phase, is a half-length novel that
   describes the struggle between Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste
   and iron will, and her son Owen over a houseful of precious antique
   furniture. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch,
   a young woman in love with Owen but sympathetic to Mrs Gereth's anguish
   over losing the antiques she patiently collected.

   James continued the more involved, psychological approach to his
   fiction with What Maisie Knew (1897), the story of the sensitive
   daughter of divorced and irresponsible parents. The novel has great
   contemporary relevance as an unflinching account of a wildly
   dysfunctional family. The book is also a notable technical achievement
   by James, as it follows the title character from earliest childhood to
   precocious maturity.

   The third period of James's career reached its most significant
   achievement in three novels published just after the turn of the
   century. Critic F. O. Matthiessen called this "trilogy" James's major
   phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study.
   Although it was the second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove
   (1902) was the first published. 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 honorable 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".

   The next published of the three novels, The Ambassadors (1903), is a
   dark comedy that follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether
   to Europe in pursuit of his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son.
   Strether is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he
   encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told
   exclusively from Strether's point of view. In his preface to the New
   York Edition text of the novel, James placed this book at the top of
   his achievements, which has occasioned some critical disagreement. The
   Golden Bowl (1904) is a complex, intense study of marriage and adultery
   that completes the "major phase" and, essentially, James's career in
   the novel. The book explores the tangle of interrelationships between a
   father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses
   deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central
   characters, with sometimes obsessive detail and powerful insight.

Shorter narratives

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

   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.

   Just as the contrast between Europe and America was a predominant theme
   in James's early novels, many of his first tales also explored the
   clash between the Old World and the New. In " A Passionate Pilgrim"
   (1871), the earliest fiction that James included in the New York
   Edition, the difference between America and Europe erupts into open
   conflict, which leads to a sadly ironic ending. The story's technique
   still seems somewhat inexpert, with passages of local colour
   description occasionally interrupting the flow of the narrative. But
   James manages to craft an interesting and believable example of what he
   would call the "Americano-European legend".

   James published many stories before what would prove to be his greatest
   success with the readers of his time, " Daisy Miller" (1878). This
   story portrays the confused courtship of the title character, a
   free-spirited American girl, by Winterbourne, a compatriot of hers with
   much more sophistication. His pursuit of Daisy is hampered by her own
   flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates they
   meet in Switzerland and Italy. Her lack of understanding of the social
   mores of the society she so desperately wishes to enter ultimately
   leads to tragedy.

   As James moved on from studies of the Europe-America clash and the
   American girl in his novels, his shorter works also explored new
   subjects in the 1880s. " The Aspern Papers" (1888) is one of James's
   best-known and most acclaimed longer tales. The storyline is based on
   an anecdote that James heard about a Shelley devotee who tried to
   obtain some valuable letters written by the poet. Set in a brilliantly
   described Venice, the story demonstrates James's ability to generate
   almost unbearable suspense while never neglecting the development of
   his characters. Another fine example of the middle phase of James's
   career in short narrative is " The Pupil" (1891), the story of a
   precocious young boy growing up in a mendacious and dishonorable
   family. He befriends his tutor, who is the only adult in his life that
   he can trust. James presents their relationship with sympathy and
   insight, and the story reaches what some have considered the status of
   classical tragedy.

   The final phase of James's short narratives shows the same
   characteristics as the final phase of his novels: a more involved
   style, a deeper psychological approach, and a sharper focus on his
   central characters. Probably his most popular short narrative among
   today's readers, " The Turn of the Screw" (1898) is a ghost story that
   has lent itself well to operatic and film adaptation. With its possibly
   ambiguous content and powerful narrative technique, the story
   challenges the reader to determine if the protagonist, an unnamed
   governess, is correctly reporting events or is instead an unreliable
   neurotic with an overheated imagination. To further muddy the waters,
   her written account of the experience—a frame tale—is being read many
   years later at a Christmas house party by someone who claims to have
   known her.

   " The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) is almost universally considered one
   of James's finest short narratives, and has often been compared with
   The Ambassadors in its meditation on experience or the lack of it. The
   story also treats other universal themes: loneliness, fate, love and
   death. The parable of John Marcher and his peculiar destiny speaks to
   anyone who has speculated on the worth and meaning of human life. Among
   his last efforts in short narrative, " The Jolly Corner" (1908) is
   usually held to be one of James's best ghost stories. The tale
   describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty
   New York house where he grew up. Brydon encounters a "sensation more
   complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."

Nonfiction

   Photograph of Henry James (1897)
   Enlarge
   Photograph of Henry James (1897)

   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 proscriptions 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 valuable
   critical articles on other novelists; typical is his insightful
   book-length study of his American predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne. When
   he assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years,
   James wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to the
   same searching, occasionally harsh criticism.

   For most of his life James harbored 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 dramatize his characters'
   thoughts and emotions. James produced a small but valuable amount of
   theatrical criticism, including perceptive appreciations of Henrik
   Ibsen.

   With his wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on
   the visual arts. Perhaps his most valuable contribution was his
   favorable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent, a
   painter whose critical status has improved markedly in recent decades.
   James also wrote sometimes charming, sometimes brooding articles about
   various places he visited and lived in. His most famous books of travel
   writing include Italian Hours (an example of the charming approach) and
   The American Scene (most definitely on the brooding side).

   James was one of the great letter-writers of any era. More than ten
   thousand of his personal letters are extant, and over three thousand
   have been published in a large number of collections. A complete
   edition of the letters is scheduled for publication beginning in 2006.
   James's correspondents included celebrated contemporaries like Robert
   Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad, along with many
   others in his wide circle of friends. The letters range from the "mere
   twaddle of graciousness" to serious discussions of artistic, social and
   personal issues. 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.

Criticism, biographies and fictional treatments

   Interior view of Lamb House, James' residence from 1897 till his death
   in 1916. (1898)
   Enlarge
   Interior view of Lamb House, James' residence from 1897 till his death
   in 1916. (1898)

   James's critical reputation fell to its lowest point in the decades
   immediately after his death. Some American critics, such as Van Wyck
   Brooks, expressed hostility towards James's long expatriation and
   eventual naturalization as a British citizen. Other critics like 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 style as difficult and obscure, relying heavily on
   extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language.

   Although these criticisms have by no means abated completely, James is
   now widely valued for his masterful creation of situations and
   storylines that reveal his characters' deepest motivations, his low-key
   but playful humor, and his assured command of the language. In his 1983
   book, The Novels of Henry James, critic Edward Wagenknecht offers a
   strongly positive assessment in words that echo 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.

   The standard biography of James is Leon Edel's massive five-volume work
   published from 1953 to 1972. Edel produced a number of updated and
   abridged versions of the biography before his death in 1997. Other
   writers such as Sheldon Novick, Lyndall Gordon, Fred Kaplan and Philip
   Horne have also published biographies that occasionally disagree
   sharply with Edel's interpretations and conclusions. Colm Tóibín used
   an extensive list of biographies of Henry James and his family for his
   2004 novel, The Master, which is a third person narrative with James as
   the central character, and deals with specific episodes from his life
   during the period between 1895 and 1899. Author, Author, a novel by
   David Lodge published in the same year, was based on James's efforts to
   conquer the stage in the 1890s. In 2002 Emma Tennant published Felony:
   The Private History of The Aspern Papers, a novel that fictionalized
   the relationship between James and American novelist Constance Fenimore
   Woolson and the possible effects of that relationship on The Aspern
   Papers.

   The published criticism of James's work has reached enormous
   proportions. The volume of criticism of The Turn of the Screw alone has
   become extremely large for such a brief work. The Henry James Review,
   published three times a year, offers criticism of James's entire range
   of writings, and many other articles and book-length studies appear
   regularly. Some guides to this extensive literature can be found on the
   external sites listed below.

Legacy

   Perhaps the most prominent examples of James's legacy in recent years
   have been the film versions of several of his novels and stories. Three
   of James's novels were filmed by the team of Ismail Merchant & James
   Ivory: The Europeans ( 1978), The Bostonians ( 1984) and The Golden
   Bowl ( 2000). The Iain Softley-directed version of The Wings of the
   Dove ( 1997) was successful with both critics and audiences. Helena
   Bonham Carter received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for
   her memorable portrayal of Kate Croy. Jane Campion tried her hand with
   The Portrait of a Lady ( 1996) but with much less success. In earlier
   times Jack Clayton's The Innocents ( 1961) brought " The Turn of the
   Screw"' to vivid life on film, and William Wyler's The Heiress ( 1949)
   did the same for Washington Square.

   James has also influenced his fellow novelists. In fact, there has been
   a recent spate of "James books", as mentioned above. Such disparate
   writers as Joyce Carol Oates with Accursed Inhabitants of the House of
   Bly (1994), Louis Auchincloss with The Ambassadress (1950), and Tom
   Stoppard with The Real Thing (1982) were explicitly influenced by
   James's works. James was definitely out of his element when it came to
   music, but Benjamin Britten's operatic version of " The Turn of the
   Screw" (1954) has become one of the composer's most popular works.
   William Tuckett converted the story into a ballet in 1999.

   Even when the influence is not so obvious, James can cast a powerful
   spell. In 1954, when the shades of depression were thickening fast,
   Ernest Hemingway wrote an emotional letter where he tried to steady
   himself as he thought James would: "Pretty soon I will have to throw
   this away so I better try to be calm like Henry James. Did you ever
   read Henry James? He was a great writer who came to Venice and looked
   out the window and smoked his cigar and thought." The odd, perhaps
   subconscious or accidental allusion to " The Aspern Papers" is
   striking. And there are the real oddities, like the Rolls-Royce ad
   which used Strether's famous words: "Live all you can; it's a mistake
   not to." That's more than a little ironic, considering The Ambassadors'
   sardonic treatment of the "great new force" of advertising.

Notable works by James

Novels

     * Watch and Ward (1871)
     * Roderick Hudson (1875)
     * The American (1877)
     * The Europeans (1878)
     * Confidence (1879)
     * Washington Square (1880)
     * The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
     * The Bostonians (1886)

     * The Princess Casamassima (1886)
     * The Reverberator (1888)
     * The Tragic Muse (1890)
     * The Other House (1896)
     * The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
     * What Maisie Knew (1897)
     * The Awkward Age (1899)
     * The Sacred Fount (1901)

     * The Wings of the Dove (1902)
     * The Ambassadors (1903)
     * The Golden Bowl (1904)
     * The Whole Family (collaborative novel with eleven other authors,
       1908)
     * The Outcry (1911)
     * The Ivory Tower (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
     * The Sense of the Past (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)

Novellas & tales

     * " A Passionate Pilgrim" (1871)
     * " Madame de Mauves" (1874)
     * " Daisy Miller" (1878)
     * " A Bundle of Letters" (1879)
     * " The Author of Beltraffio" (1884)
     * " The Aspern Papers" (1888)
     * " A London Life" (1888)

     * " The Pupil" (1891)
     * " The Real Thing" (1892)
     * " The Middle Years" (1893)
     * " The Altar of the Dead" (1895)
     * " The Turn of the Screw" (1898)
     * " In the Cage" (1898)
     * " Europe" (1899)

     * " Paste" (1899)
     * " The Great Good Place" (1900)
     * " Mrs. Medwin" (1900)
     * " The Birthplace" (1903)
     * " The Beast in the Jungle" (1903)
     * " The Jolly Corner" (1908)

Travel writings

     * A Little Tour in France (1884)
     * English Hours (1905)

                                       * The American Scene (1907)
                                       * Italian Hours (1909)

Literary criticism

     * French Poets and Novelists (1878)
     * Hawthorne (1879)
     * Partial Portraits (1888)
     * Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893)

                                              * New York Edition (1907-1909)
                                              * Notes on Novelists (1914)
                                              * Notebooks (various)

Autobiography

     * A Small Boy and Others (1913)
     * Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)

     * The Middle Years (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)

Plays

     * Theatricals (1894)
     * Theatricals: Second Series (1895)

                                          * Guy Domville (1895)

Biography

     * William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)

Visual arts criticism

     * Picture and Text (1893)

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