Henry James

Henry James
Life & work
Henry James OM (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an American-born British author. He is
regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is
considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son
of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice
James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay
between émigré Americans, English people, and continental Europeans. Examples of such
novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. His later
works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social
dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory
motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche.
Henry became a friend of painter John La Farge, who introduced him to French literature, and in
particular, to Balzac. James later called Balzac his "greatest master", and said that he had learned
more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else.
His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell
in Fanchon the Cricket," published in 1863.[7] About a year later, "A Tragedy of Error", his first
short story, was published anonymously. James's first payment was for an appreciation of Sir
Walter Scott's novels, written for the North American Review. He wrote fiction and nonfiction
pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where Fields was editor. In 1871, he published his
first novel, Watch and Ward, in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly. The novel was later
published in book form in 1878
First phase of his career
Recognizing the appeal of Europe, given his cosmopolitan upbringing, James made a deliberate
effort to discover whether he could live and work in the United States. Two years in Boston, two
years in Europe, mainly in Rome, and a winter of unremitting hackwork in New York
City convinced him that he could write better and live more cheaply abroad. Thus began his long
expatriation—heralded by publication in 1875 of the novel Roderick Hudson, the story of an
American sculptor’s struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions;
During 1875–76 James lived in Paris, writing literary and topical letters for the New York
Tribune and working on his novel The American (1877), the story of a self-made American
millionaire whose guileless and forthright character contrasts with that of the arrogant and
cunning family of French aristocrats whose daughter he unsuccessfully attempts to marry.
Much as he liked France, James felt that he would be an eternal outsider there, and late in 1876
he crossed to London. There, in small rooms in Bolton Street off Piccadilly, he wrote the
major fiction of his middle 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. In England he was promptly taken up by the leading Victorians and
became a regular at Lord Houghton’s breakfasts, where he consorted with Alfred Tennyson,
William Gladstone, Robert Browning, and others.
James 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.
Middle phase of his career
James 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. In The Princess
Casamassima James exploited the anarchist violence of the decade and depicted the struggle of a
man who toys with revolution and is destroyed by it. These novels were followed by The Tragic
Muse (1890), in which James projected a study of the London and Paris art studios and the stage,
the conflict between art and “the world.”
In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw and In the
Cage (1898), and The Awkward Age (1899), James began to use the methods of alternating
“picture” and dramatic scene, close adherence to a given angle of vision, a withholding of
information from the reader, making available to him only that which the characters see.
Career—final phase
The experiments of this “transition” phase led James to the writing of three grandiose novels at
the beginning of the new century, which represent his final—his “major”—phase, as it has been
called.
The first of the three novels was The Ambassadors (1903). This is a high comedy of manners, of
a middle-aged American who goes to Paris to bring back to a Massachusetts industrial town a
wealthy young man who, in the view of his affluent family, has lingered too long abroad. The
“ambassador” in the end is captivated by civilized Parisian life. The novel is a study in the
growth of perception and awareness in the elderly hero, and it balances the relaxed moral
standards of the European continent against the parochial rigidities of New England. The second
of this series of novels was The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902, before The
Ambassadors, although written after it. This novel, dealing with a melodramatic subject of
great pathos, that of an heiress doomed by illness to die, avoids its cliche subject by focusing
upon the characters surrounding the unfortunate young woman.
His final novel was The Golden Bowl (1904), a study of adultery, with four principal characters.
The first part of the story is seen through the eyes of the aristocratic husband and the second
through the developing awareness of the wife.
Henry James’s career was one of the longest and most productive—and most influential—in
American letters. A master of prose fiction from the first, he practiced it as a fertile innovator,
enlarged the form, and placed upon it the stamp of a highly individual method and style. He
wrote for 51 years—20 novels, 112 tales, 12 plays, several volumes of travel and criticism, and a
great deal of literary journalism. He recognized and helped to fashion the myth of the American
abroad and incorporated this myth in the “international novel,” of which he was the
acknowledged master.

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Life & work

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