Henry James

 

Henry James was an American novelist and, as a naturalizedEnglish citizen, a great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old.

He was named for his father, a prominent social theorist and lecturer, and was the younger brother of the pragmatist philosopher William James. They were taken abroad as infants, were schooled by tutors and governesses, and spent their preadolescent years in Manhattan. Returned to Geneva, Paris, and London during their teens, the James children acquired languages and an awareness of Europe few Americans had in their times. When he was 19 years of age Henry enrolled at the Harvard Law School, but he devoted his study time to reading Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Honoré de Balzac, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His first story appeared anonymouslytwo years later in the New YorkContinentalMonthlyand his first book reviews in theNorth American Review. By his mid-20s James was regarded as one of the most skillful writers of short stories in America.

James began his long expatriation in the 1870s, heralded by publication of the novel Roderick Hudson (1875), the story of an American sculptor’s struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions; Transatlantic Sketches, his first collection of travel writings; and a collection of tales. With these three substantial books, he inaugurated a career that saw about 100 volumes through the press during the next 40 years. In 1878 he achieved international renown with his story of an American flirt in Rome, Daisy Miller, and further advanced his reputation with The Europeans that same year.

James’s reputation was founded on his versatile studies of“the American girl,” and he ended this first phase of his career by producing his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady(1881), a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her narrow provincialism and pretensions but also her sense of her own sovereignty, her “free spirit,” her refusal to be treated, in the Victorian world, merely as a marriageable object. As a picture of Americans moving in the expatriate society of England and of Italy, this novel has no equal in the history of modern fiction.

Subsequent works were many. In The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886), his subjects were social reformers and revolutionaries. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Turn of the Screw (1898), he made use of complex moral and psychological ambiguity. The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) were the great novels of the final phase of his career, all showing a small group of characters in a tense situation, with a retrospective working out, through multiple angles of vision, of their drama. In these late works James resorted to an increasingly allusive prose style, which became dense and charged with symbolic imagery.

In his later years, James lived in retirement in an 18thcentury house at Rye in Sussex, though on completion of The Golden Bowl he revisited the United States in 1904–05 James had lived abroad for 20 years, and in the interval America had become a great industrial and political power. On his return to England he wrote The American Scene (1907), prophetic in its vision of urban doom, spoliation, and pollution of resources and filled with misgivings over the anomalies of a “melting pot” civilization. He devoted three years to rewriting and revising his principal novels and tales for the highly selective “New York Edition,” published in 24 volumes. For this edition James wrote 18 significant prefaces, which contain both reminiscence and exposition of his theories of fiction. Throwing his moral weight into Britain’s struggle in World War I, James became a British subject in 1915 and received the Order ofMerit from King George V.