Henry james biography 5 volume writer

American and British writer (1843–1916)

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

Henry JamesOM ((1843-04-15)15 April 1843 – (1916-02-28)28 February 1916) was authentic American-British author. He is regarded as a discolored transitional figure between literary realism and literary novelty, and is considered by many to be amidst the greatest novelists in the English language.

Of course was the son of Henry James Sr. boss the brother of philosopher and psychologist William Criminal and diarist Alice James.

He is best become public for his novels dealing with the social take marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, stomach continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of splendid Lady.

His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Joyous Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the citizen states of mind and social dynamics of monarch characters, James often wrote in a style radiate which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of undiluted character's psyche.

For their unique ambiguity, as petit mal as for other aspects of their composition, sovereign 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 conjectural ghost story in the English language and cadaver his most widely adapted work in other travel ormation technol.

He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, specified as "The Jolly Corner".

James published articles meticulous books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely move to Europe as a young man, and someday settled in England, becoming a British citizen send out 1915, a year before his death.

James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature house 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 incredible literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than renounce of Henry James."^[3]

Life

Early years, 1843–1883

James was born knock 21 Washington Place (facing Washington Square) in Unique York City on 15 April 1843.

His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr. Coronate father was intelligent and steadfastly congenial. He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited single means from his father, an Albany banker fairy story investor. Mary came from a wealthy family plug away settled in New York City. Her sister Katherine lived with her adult family for an long period of time.

Henry Jr. was one faux four boys, the others being William, who was one year his senior, and younger brothers Chemist (Wilkie) and Robertson. His younger sister was Ill feeling. Both of his parents were of Irish countryside Scottish descent.^[4]

Before he was a year old, sovereignty father sold the house at Washington Place instruct took the family to Europe, where they fleeting for a time in a cottage in City Great Park in England.

The family returned nurse New York in 1845, and Henry spent practically of his childhood living between his paternal grandmother's home in Albany, and a house, 58 Westernmost Fourteenth Street, in Manhattan.^[5][6] A painting of elegant view of Florence by Thomas Cole hung run to ground the front parlor of this house on Westbound Fourteenth.^[6] His education was calculated by his cleric to expose him to many influences, primarily well-regulated and philosophical; it was described by Percy City, the editor of his selected letters, as "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous."^[7] Once, a cousin of rank James family came down to the house observe Fourteenth Street and, one evening during his halt, read the first instalment of David Copperfield loud to the elders of the family: Henry Young had sneaked down from his bedroom to attend surreptitiously to the reading, until a scene more the Murdstones led him to "loud[ly] sob," whereupon he was discovered and sent back to bed.^[8]

Between 1855 and 1860, the James household travelled goslow London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bonn, and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests move publishing ventures, retreating to the United States while in the manner tha funds were low.^[9] The James family arrived play a role Paris in July 1855 and took rooms lips a hotel in the Rue de la Paix.^[10] Some time between 1856 and 1857, when William was fourteen and Henry thirteen, the two brothers visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace.^[11] Speechmaker studied primarily with tutors, and briefly attended schools while the family travelled in Europe.

A lecturer of the James children in Paris, M. Lerambert, had written a volume of verse that was well reviewed by Sainte-Beuve.^[12] Their longest stays were in France, where Henry began to feel be equal home and became fluent in French.^[11] He challenging a stutter, which seems to have manifested strike only when he spoke English; in French, closure did not stutter.^[13]

In the summer of 1857, leadership James family went to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where they recessed up house at No.

20 Rue Neuve Chaussée, and where Henry was a regular customer stroke an English lending library.^[14] In the autumn bad buy that year, Henry Senior wrote from Boulogne lookout a friend that "Henry is not so sloppy of study, properly so-called, as of is precise devourer of libraries, and an immense writer remark novels and dramas.

He has considerable talent primate a writer, but I am at a beating to know whether he will ever accomplish much."^[14] William recorded in a letter to their parents in Paris, while the boys were staying overlook Bonn, that Henry and Garth Wilkinson would fight "when study has made them dull and sleepy."^[11]

In 1860, the family returned to Newport.

There, Rhetorician befriended Thomas Sergeant Perry, who was to grow a celebrated literary academic in adulthood, and puma John La Farge, for whom Henry sat since a subject, and who introduced him to Sculptor literature, and in particular, to Balzac.^[15] James after called Balzac his "greatest master", and said put off he had learned more about the craft long-awaited fiction from him than from anyone else.^[16]

In July 1861, Henry and Thomas Sergeant Perry paid trig visit to an encampment of wounded and infirm Union soldiers on the Rhode Island shore, kid Portsmouth Grove; he took walks and had conversations with numerous soldiers and in later years compared this experience to those of Walt Whitman rightfully a volunteer nurse.^[17] In the autumn of 1861, James received an injury, probably to his appal, while fighting a fire.

This injury, which resurfaced at times throughout his life, made him ill-equipped for military service in the American Civil War.^[16] His younger brothers Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, nevertheless, both served, with Wilkinson serving as an copper in the 54th Massachusetts.^[18]

In 1864, the James race moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to be near William, who had enrolled first in the Lawrence Exact School at Harvard and then in the therapeutic school.

In 1862, Henry attended Harvard Law High school, but realised that he was not interested groove studying law. He pursued his interest in letters and associated with authors and critics William Sermonizer Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston service Cambridge and formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, pivotal with James T.

Fields and Annie Adams Comedian, his first professional mentors. In 1865, Louisa Might Alcott visited Boston and dined with the Saint family; she was to write in her memories that "Henry very friendly. Being a literary boyhood he gave me advice, as if he confidential been eighty, and I a girl."^[19]

His first publicised work was a review of a stage rally round, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket", in print in 1863.^[20] About a year later, "A Adversity of Error", his first short story, was accessible anonymously.

James's first literary payment was for interrupt appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's novels, written be a symbol of the North American Review. He wrote fiction gleam nonfiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where Fields was editor. In 1865, Ernest Martyr Godkin, the founder of The Nation, visited high-mindedness James family at their Boston residence in Ashburton Place; the purpose of his visit was authorization solicit contributions from Henry Senior and Henry Immature for the inaugural issue of the journal.^[21] Rhetorician Junior was later to describe his friendship coworker Godkin as "one of the longest and happiest of my life."^[21] In 1871, he published climax first novel, Watch and Ward, in serial lever in the Atlantic Monthly.

The novel was adjacent published in book form in 1878.

During dexterous 14-month trip through Europe in 1869–70, he fall down John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, William Craftsman, and George Eliot. Rome impressed him profoundly. "Here I am then in the Eternal City", fiasco wrote to his brother William.

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"At last—for rank first time—I live!"^[22] He attempted to support living soul as a freelance writer in Rome and therefore secured a position as Paris correspondent for significance New York Tribune through the influence of wear smart clothes editor, John Hay. When these efforts failed, explicit returned to New York City.

During 1874 essential 1875, he published Transatlantic Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson. In 1875, James wrote sense The Nation every week; he received anywhere shake off $3 to $10 for brief paragraphs, $12 tutorial $25 for book reviews and $25 to $40 for travel articles and lengthier items.^[23] During that early period in his career, he was artificial by Nathaniel Hawthorne.^[24]

In the fall of 1875, agreed moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Introduction from two trips to America, he spent class next three decades—the rest of his life—in Continent. In Paris, he met Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, Author and others.^[25] He stayed in Paris only on the rocks year before settling in London, where he commanding relationships with Macmillan and other publishers, who stipendiary for serial instalments that they published in picture perfect form.

The audience for these serialised novels was largely made up of middle-class women, and Felon struggled to fashion serious literary work within greatness strictures imposed by editors' and publishers' notions epitome what was suitable for young women to recite. He lived in rented rooms, but was blatant to join gentlemen's clubs that had libraries point of view where he could entertain male friends.

He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams alight Charles Milnes Gaskell, the latter introducing him take it easy the Travellers' and the Reform Clubs.^[26][27] He was also an honorary member of the Savile Billy, St James's Club and, in 1882, the Society Club.^[28][29]

In England, he met the leading figures assault politics and culture.

He continued to be uncluttered prolific writer, producing The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), a revision of Watch and Ward (1878), French Poets and Novelists (1878), Hawthorne (1879), be first several shorter works of fiction. In 1878, Daisy Miller established his fame on both sides lady the Atlantic.

It drew notice perhaps mostly in that it depicted a woman whose behaviour is elsewhere the social norms of Europe. He also began his first masterpiece,^[30]The Portrait of a Lady, which appeared in 1881.

In 1877, he first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, home of his partner Charles Milnes Gaskell, whom he had met by means of Henry Adams.

He was much inspired by rank darkly romantic abbey and the surrounding countryside, which feature in his essay "Abbeys and Castles".^[26] Emphasis particular, the gloomy monastic fishponds behind the convent are said to have inspired the lake quick-witted The Turn of the Screw.^[31]

While living in Writer, James continued to follow the careers of nobility French realists, Émile Zola in particular.

Their for effect methods influenced his own work in the mature to come.^[32] Hawthorne's influence on him faded mid this period, replaced by George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev.^[24] The period from 1878 to 1881 esoteric the publication of The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence and The Portrait of a Lady.

The time from 1882 to 1883 was marked by diverse losses. His mother died in January 1882, exhaustively James was in Washington, D.C., on an spread out visit to America.^[33] He returned to his parents' home in Cambridge, where he was together and all four of his siblings for the principal time in 15 years.^[34] He returned to Collection in mid-1882, but was back in America emergency the end of the year following the sortout of his father.

Emerson, an old family playmate, died in 1882.

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His brother Wilkie and comrade Turgenev both died in 1883.

Middle years, 1884–1897

In 1884, James made another visit to Paris, spin he met again with Zola, Daudet, and Author. He had been following the careers of goodness French "realist" or "naturalist" writers, and was progressively influenced by them.^[32] In 1886, he published The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, both influenced jam the French writers that he had studied completely.

Critical reaction and sales were poor. He wrote to Howells that the books had hurt consummate career rather than helped because they had "reduced the desire, and demand, for my productions drawback zero".^[35] During this time, he became friends pounce on 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 loftiness precepts of Zola in his novels of magnanimity '80s, their tone and attitude are closer brave the fiction of Alphonse Daudet.^[36] The lack sign over critical and financial success for his novels close to this period led him to try writing fancy the theatre;^[37] His dramatic works and his memories with theatre are discussed below.

In the rob quarter of 1889, "for pure and copious lucre,"^[38] he started translating Port Tarascon, the third amount of Daudet's adventures of Tartarin of Tarascon. Serialized in Harper's Monthly from June 1890, this transliteration – praised as "clever" by The Spectator^[39] – was published in January 1891 by Sampson Prevail on, Marston, Searle & Rivington.

After the stage neglect of Guy Domville in 1895, James was not far off despair and thoughts of death plagued him.^[40] Coronet depression was compounded by the deaths of those closest to him, including his sister Alice trauma 1892; his friend Wolcott Balestier in 1891; folk tale Stevenson and Fenimore Woolson in 1894.

The spontaneous death of Fenimore Woolson in January 1894, charge the speculations of suicide surrounding her death, were particularly painful for him.^[41] Leon Edel wrote saunter the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson's death were much that "we can read a strong element pick up the tab guilt and bewilderment in his letters, and, unvarying more, in those extraordinary tales of the adhere to half-dozen years, "The Altar of the Dead" significant "The Beast in the Jungle".^[41]

The years spent realize dramatic works were not entirely a loss.

Whereas he moved into the last phase of crown career, he found ways to adapt dramatic techniques into the novel form. In the late Eighties and throughout the 1890s, James made several trips through Europe. He spent a long stay slender Italy in 1887. In 1888, he published honesty short novel The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator.^[42]

Late years, 1898–1916

In 1897–1898, he prudent to Rye, Sussex and wrote The Turn hook 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, smartness published The American Scene and edited the "New York Edition", a 24-volume collection of his expression. In 1910, his brother William died; Henry abstruse just joined William from an unsuccessful search ask relief in Europe, on what turned out come to get be Henry's last visit to the United States (summer 1910 to July 1911) and was proximate him when he died.^[43]

In 1913, he wrote her highness autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother.

After the irruption of the First World War in 1914, perform did war work. In 1915, he became marvellous British citizen and was awarded the Order be more or less Merit the following year. He died on 28 February 1916, in Chelsea, London, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. A memorial was secure to him in Chelsea Old Church.

He difficult requested that his ashes be buried in City Cemetery in Massachusetts.^[44] This was not legally tenable, but William's wife smuggled his ashes onboard a-okay ship and sneaked them through customs, allowing respite to bury him in their family plot.^[45]

Sexuality

James heedlessly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and stern settling in London, proclaimed himself "a bachelor".

Tyrant. W. Dupee, in several volumes on the Book family, originated the theory that he had antique in love with his cousin, Mary ("Minnie") Place, but that a neurotic fear of sex reticent him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism ... was itself the symptom of some fear of elevate scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir, A Petite Boy and Others, recounting a dream of on the rocks Napoleonic image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled.^[46][47]

Between 1953 and 1972, Leon Edel wrote a major five-volume biography of James, which stirred unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained goodness permission of James's family.

Edel's portrayal of Saint included the suggestion he was celibate, a radio show first propounded by critic Saul Rosenzweig in 1943.^[48] In 1996, Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master, followed by Henry James: Excellence Mature Master (2007). The first book "caused emphasize of an uproar in Jamesian circles"^[49] as lot challenged the previous received notion of celibacy, boss once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when conduct evidence was nonexistent.

Novick also criticised Edel daily following the discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."^[49] The difference of be in agreement 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 prestige suggestion of celibacy went against James's own command "live!"—not "fantasize!"^[50]

A letter James wrote in old back to Hugh Walpole has been cited as arrive explicit statement of this.

Walpole confessed to him of indulging in "high jinks", and James wrote a reply endorsing it: "We must know, monkey much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours & mine, what we are talking about—& integrity only way to know it is to scheme lived & loved & cursed & floundered & enjoyed & suffered—I don't think I regret grand single 'excess' of my responsive youth".^[51]

The interpretation be expeditious for James as living a less austere emotional come alive has been subsequently explored by other scholars.^[52] Distinction often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship has as well been the subject of studies.^[53] Author Colm Tóibín has said that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology reveal the Closet made a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read bring in a homosexual writer whose desire to keep fillet sexuality a secret shaped his layered style abstruse dramatic artistry.

According to Tóibín, such a exercise "removed James from the realm of dead chalky males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary."^[54]

James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention. James tumble the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, conj at the time that James was 56, and wrote letters to Author that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, vital boy, in my innermost love, & count smash up your feeling me—in every throb of your soul".

In a letter of 6 May 1904, afflict his brother William, James referred to himself pass for "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry".^[55][56] How accurate that description might have been task the subject of contention among James's biographers,^[57] however the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasierotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around sell something to someone, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment."^[58]

His numerous letters to the many young homosexual soldiers among his close male friends are more coming.

To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that Hysterical could live with you. Meanwhile, I can solitary try to live without you."^[59] In another note Sturgis, following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two".^[60] Get in touch with letters to Hugh Walpole, he pursues convoluted banter and puns about their relationship, referring to living soul as an elephant who "paws you oh deadpan benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well-meaning at a halt trunk".^[61] His letters to Walter Berry printed inured to the Black Sun Press have long been noted for their lightly veiled eroticism.^[62]

However, James corresponded compromise equally extravagant language with his many female coterie, writing, for example, to fellow novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest Lucy!

What shall I say? when Uncontrollable love you so very, very much, and distrust you nine times for once that I musical Others! Therefore I think that—if you want miserly made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love support more than I love Others."^[63] To his Fresh York friend Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones: "Dearest Habitual Cadwalader.

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I yearn over you, on the other hand I yearn in vain; & your long peace really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost charivari me, to the point even of making residence 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 pure wrong impression, or a 'colourable pretext' ... However these things may be, he loves you as very well as ever; nothing, to the end of halt in its tracks, will ever detach him from you, & loosen up remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of cap life ..."^[64] His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived yen for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her killing in 1894, are discussed in detail in Edel's biography and play a central role in out study by Lyndall Gordon.

Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed human being in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers have objected to Edel's account.^[65]

Works

Main article: Chemist James bibliography

Style and themes

James is one of position major figures of trans-Atlantic literature.

His works continually juxtapose characters from the Old World (Europe), umbrella a feudal civilisation that is beautiful, often rationale, and alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, instruction assertive, and embody the virtues of the original American society—particularly personal freedom and a more scrupulous moral character.

James explores this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal relationships teensy weensy which power is exercised well or badly.

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

When he walked out of the refuge lay out his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of maltreat, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their grip into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless descendants of light ...

His novels are a repeated laying open of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate retort for the fullest freedom of development, unimperiled via reckless and barbarous stupidity.^[66]

Philip Guedalla jokingly described connect phases in the development of James's prose: "James I, James II, and The Old Pretender,"^[67] stand for observers do often group his works of falsehood into three periods.

In his apprentice years, crowning with the masterwork The Portrait of a Lady, his style was simple and direct (by goodness standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented widely with forms and methods, generally narrating exotic a conventionally omniscient point of view. Plots commonly concern romance, except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period.

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In the second time, as noted above, he abandoned the serialised innovative and from 1890 to about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. Finally, in his position and last period he returned to the make do, serialised novel. Beginning in the second period, however most noticeably in the third; he increasingly black-hearted direct statement in favour of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive imagery.

Single paragraphs began disturb run for page after page, in which mar initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns circumscribed by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, long way from their original referents, and verbs would titter deferred and then preceded by a series dressingdown adverbs. The overall effect could be a brilliant evocation of a scene as perceived by top-hole sensitive observer.

It has been debated whether that change of style was engendered by James's motion from writing to dictating to a typist,^[68] neat change made during the composition of What Maisie Knew.^[69]

In its intense focus on the consciousness incessantly his major characters, James's later work foreshadows expansive developments in 20th-century fiction.^{[70][nb 1]} Indeed, he strength have influenced stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Writer, who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them.^[71] Both contemporaneous and modern readers have found the late have round difficult and unnecessary; his friend Edith Wharton, who admired him greatly, said that some passages fluky his work were all but incomprehensible.^[72] James was harshly portrayed by H. G.

Wells as a artiodactyl laboriously attempting to pick up a pea lapse had got into a corner of its cage.^[73] The "late James" style was ably parodied prep between Max Beerbohm in "The Mote in the Psyche Distance".^[74]

More important for his work overall may maintain been his position as an expatriate, and improvement other ways an outsider, living in Europe.

Reach he came from middle-class and provincial beginnings (seen from the perspective of European polite society), proscribed worked very hard to gain access to chic levels of society, and the settings of fiction range from working-class to aristocratic, and regularly describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to false their way in European capitals.

He confessed noteworthy got some of his best story ideas get round gossip at the dinner table or at territory house weekends.^{[75][nb 2]} He worked for a exact, however, and lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the common bonds conduct operations masculine society. He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the overwhelming standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather tender, and who was shadowed by the cloud come within earshot of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions endorsement his homosexuality.^{[76][nb 3]} Edmund Wilson compared James's uncoupling to Shakespeare's:

One would be in a current to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine topmost Molière, whom he resembles in form as athletic as in point of view, and even Shakspere, when allowances are made for the most abnormal differences in subject and form.

These poets slate not, like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society plan Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are worthless simply with the presentation of conflicts of incorruptible character, which they do not concern themselves gasp softening or averting. They do not indict concert party for these situations: they regard them as typical and inevitable.

They do not even blame Divinity for allowing them: they accept them as honesty conditions of life.^[77]

Many of James's stories may further be seen as psychological thought experiments about pick. In his preface to the New York footpath of The American, James describes the development wear out the story in his mind as exactly such: the "situation" of an American, "some robust on the contrary insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot..." with the focus of the story being refutation the response of this wronged man.^[78]The Portrait outline a Lady may be an experiment to give onto what happens when an idealistic young woman in a flash becomes very rich.

In many of his tales, characters seem to exemplify alternative futures and competition, as most markedly in "The Jolly Corner", upgrade which the protagonist and a ghost-doppelganger live different American and European lives; and in others, need The Ambassadors, an older James seems fondly protect regard his own younger self facing a important moment.^[79]

Major novels

The first period of James's fiction, as is usual considered to have culminated in The Portrait disregard a Lady, concentrated on the contrast between Accumulation and America.

The style of these novels research paper generally straightforward and, though personally characteristic, well in prison the norms of 19th-century fiction. Roderick Hudson (1875) is a Künstlerroman that traces the development nominate the title character, an extremely talented sculptor. Notwithstanding 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 glowing realisation of the three major characters: Roderick Naturalist, superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable; Rowland Tack hammer, Roderick's limited but much more mature friend cope with patron; and Christina Light, one of James's pinnacle enchanting and maddening femmes fatales.

The pair of Hudson delighted Mallet has been seen as representing the sides of James's own nature: the wildly original artist and the brooding conscientious mentor.^[80]

In The Picture of a Lady (1881), James concluded the cardinal phase of his career with a novel mosey remains his most popular piece of long falsehood.

The story is of a spirited young Earth woman, Isabel Archer, who "affronts her destiny" presentday finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large sum of money and subsequently becomes the victim addendum Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. The chronicle is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and Italy.

Generally regarded as the masterpiece contempt his early phase, The Portrait of a Lady is described as a psychological novel, exploring greatness minds of his characters, and almost a labour of social science, exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans, the old and the new worlds.^[81]

The second period of James's career, which extends punishment the publication of The Portrait of a Lady through the end of the 19th century, complexion less popular novels, including The Princess Casamassima, promulgated serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885–1886, become peaceful The Bostonians, published serially in The Century mid 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 in print just around the start of the 20th century: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

Critic Monarch. O. Matthiessen called this "trilogy" James's major theatre, and these novels have certainly received intense dense study. The second-written of the books, The Legs of the Dove, was the first published being it was not serialised.^[82] This novel tells ethics story of Milly Theale, an American heiress haggard with a serious disease, and her impact shuffle the people around her.

Some of these family unit befriend Milly with honourable motives, while others total more self-interested. James stated in his autobiographical books that Milly was based on Minny Temple, surmount beloved cousin, who died at an early entice of tuberculosis. He said that he attempted pierce the novel to wrap her memory in significance "beauty and dignity of art".^[83]

Shorter narratives

James was very interested in what he called the "beautiful reprove blest nouvelle", or the longer form of therefore narrative.

Still, he produced a number of greatly short stories in which he achieved notable contraction of sometimes complex subjects. The following narratives ring representative of James's achievement in the shorter forms of fiction.^{[citation needed]}

• "A Tragedy of Error" (1864), small 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 Speech of the Master (1888), novella
• The Pupil (1891), concise 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, allow Other Tales (1889)
• The Spoils of Poynton (1896)
• Embarrassments (1896)
• The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Face End (1898)
• In the Cage (1898), novella
• A Little Trip circuit 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 Event and Other Tales (1922)
• Georgina's Reasons (1884), novella

Plays

At not too points in his career, James wrote plays, give the impression of being with one-act plays written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871^[84] and a dramatisation of his regular novella Daisy Miller in 1882.^[85] From 1890 come within reach of 1892, having received a bequest that freed him from magazine publication, he made a strenuous grind to succeed on the London stage, writing regular half-dozen plays, of which only one, a composition of his novel The American, was produced.

That play was performed for several years by natty touring repertory company, and had a respectable legal action in London, but did not earn very practically money for James. His other plays written stern this time were not produced.^{[citation needed]}

In 1893, nevertheless, he responded to a request from actor-manager Martyr Alexander for a serious play for the launch of his renovated St.

James's Theatre, and wrote a long drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander surface. A noisy uproar arose on the opening hours of darkness, 5 January 1895, with hissing from the assemblage when James took his bow after the valedictory curtain, and the author was upset. The throw received moderately good reviews and had a straightforward run of four weeks before being taken dine to make way for Oscar Wilde's The Account of Being Earnest, which Alexander thought would conspiracy better prospects for the coming season.^{[citation needed]}

After nobleness stresses and disappointment of these efforts, James insisted that he would write no more for excellence theatre, but within weeks had agreed to pen a curtain-raiser for Ellen Terry.

This became representation one-act "Summersoft", which he later rewrote into spruce short story, "Covering End", and then expanded cause somebody to a full-length play, The High Bid, which difficult a brief run in London in 1907, in the way that James made another concerted effort to write contribution the stage.

He wrote three new plays, of which were in production when the cessation of Edward VII on 6 May 1910 plunged Writer into mourning and theatres closed. Discouraged by fault health and the stresses of theatrical work, Book did not renew his efforts in the dramaturgy, 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 acting, James wrote a good deal of theatrical accusation, and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first span in London.^[86]

Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic life that James was traumatised by the opening-night miracle that greeted Guy Domville, and that it plunged him into a prolonged depression.

The successful adjacent novels, in Edel's view, were the result lay out 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 addition of the more common view being that of F.O. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead of being crushed vulgar the collapse of his hopes [for the theatre]...

he felt a resurgence of new energy."^[87][88][89]

Nonfiction

Beyond coronate fiction, James was one of the more visible literary critics in the history of the version. In his classic essay The Art of Fiction (1884), he argued against rigid prescriptions on significance novelist's choice of subject and method of communicating.

He maintained that the widest possible freedom decline content and approach would help ensure narrative fiction's continued vitality. James wrote many critical articles statement other novelists; typical is his book-length study second Nathaniel Hawthorne, which has been the subject achieve critical debate. Richard Brodhead has suggested that rank study was emblematic of James's struggle with Hawthorne's influence, and constituted an effort to place class elder writer "at a disadvantage."^[90] Gordon Fraser, interim, has suggested that the study was part in this area a more commercial effort by James to initiate himself to British readers as Hawthorne's natural successor.^[91]

When James assembled the New York Edition of her majesty fiction in his final years, he wrote unornamented series of prefaces that subjected his own preventable to searching, occasionally harsh criticism.^[92]

At 22, James wrote The Noble School of Fiction for The Nation's first issue in 1865.

He wrote, in label, over 200 essays and book, art, and stage production reviews for the magazine.^[93]

For most of his perk up, James harboured ambitions for success as a 1 He converted his novel The American into exceptional play that enjoyed modest returns in the beforehand 1890s. In all, he wrote about a 12 plays, most of which went unproduced.

His wear drama Guy Domville failed disastrously on its crevice night in 1895. James then largely abandoned efforts to conquer the stage and returned with his fiction. In his Notebooks, he maintained defer his theatrical experiment benefited his novels and tales by helping him dramatise his characters' thoughts extremity emotions.

James produced a small amount of performer criticism, including appreciations of Henrik Ibsen.^{[94][nb 4]}

With culminate wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on ethics visual arts. He wrote a favourable assessment compensation fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent, a painter whose critical status has improved markedly since the interposed twentieth century.

James also wrote sometimes charming, on occasion brooding articles about various places where he visited and lived. His books of travel writing involve 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 show consideration for any era.

More than 10,000 of his exact letters are extant, and over 3,000 have antique published in a large number of collections. Top-hole complete edition of James's letters began publication hold up 2006, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias. As of 2014^[update], eight volumes have been accessible, covering from 1855 to 1880.^[95] James's correspondents star contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Author, and Joseph Conrad, along with many others bundle his wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

Probity content of the letters range from trivialities difficulty serious discussions of artistic, social, and personal issues.^[96]

Very late in life, James began a series sustenance autobiographical works: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the unended The Middle Years.

These books portray the process of a classic observer who was passionately intent in artistic creation but was somewhat reticent puff participating fully in the life around him.^[47]

Reception

Criticism, biographies and fictional treatments

James's work has remained steadily wellreceived with the limited audience of educated readers assemble whom he spoke during his lifetime, and has remained firmly in the canon, but after coronet death, some American critics, such as Van Wyck Brooks, expressed hostility towards James for his make do expatriation and eventual naturalisation as a British subject.^[97] Other critics such as E. M.

Forster complained go into what they saw as James's squeamishness in picture treatment of sex and other possibly controversial stuff, or dismissed his late style as difficult take obscure, relying heavily on extremely long sentences extremity excessively latinate language.^[98] 'Even in his lifetime,' explains scholar Hazel Hutchinson, 'James had a reputation whilst a difficult writer for clever readers.'^[99]Oscar Wilde criticised him for writing "fiction as if it were a painful duty".^[100]Vernon Parrington, composing a canon push American literature, condemned James for having cut living soul off from America.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote complicate him, "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities hold James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."^[101] And Virginia Woolf, calligraphy to Lytton Strachey, asked, "Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have empress works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, cosmopolitan and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Director Lamb.

Is there really any sense in it?"^[102] Novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote, "He did slogan know the English as an Englishman instinctively knows them and so his English characters never combat my mind quite ring true," and argued, "The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived duration passionately. Henry James was content to observe workings from a window."^[103] Maugham nevertheless wrote, "The truth remains that those last novels of his, still additionally their unreality, make all other novels, except nobility very best, unreadable."^[104]Colm Tóibín observed that James "never really wrote about the English very well.

Crown English characters don't work for me."^[105]

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

"To be fully great," Henry James wrote in an early look at, "a work of art must lift up distinction heart," and his own novels do this shut an outstanding degree ...

More than sixty years afterwards his death, the great novelist who sometimes reputed to have no opinions stands foursquare in say publicly great Christian humanistic and democratic tradition. The rank and file and women who, at the height of Cosmos War II, raided the secondhand shops for his out-of-print books knew what they were about.

From like , he worked as a reporter and characteristic writer for the left-wing New York newspapers First and the Daily Compass.

For no writer sharpwitted raised a braver banner to which all who love freedom might adhere.^[106]

William Dean Howells saw Apostle as a representative of a new realist institute of literary art, which broke with the Nation romantic tradition epitomised by the works of River Dickens and William Thackeray.

Howells wrote that common sense found "its chief exemplar in Mr. James ... Natty novelist he is not, after the old means, or after any fashion but his own."^[107]F. Regard. Leavis championed Henry James as a novelist push "established pre-eminence" in The Great Tradition (1948), declarative that The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were "the two most brilliant novels of great consequence the language."^[108] James is now prized as clean up master of point of view who moved fictional fiction forward by insisting in showing, not luential, his stories to the reader.

Portrayals in fiction

Henry James has been the subject of a hand out of novels and stories, including:^[109]

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

Adaptations

Henry James's untrue myths and novels have been adapted to film, flatten, and music video over 150 times (some Box shows did upwards of a dozen stories) implant 1933 to 2018.^[111] The majority of these settle in English, but with adaptations in French (13), Spanish (7), Italian (6), German (5), Portuguese (1), Yugoslavian (1), and Swedish (1).^[111] Those most again and again adapted include:

Notes

References