Henry james senior biography sample

You were ground in the very mill of the conventional! He was acquainted with many notable literary figures of the day including Robert Browning, Ivan S. American-born and never married, James would live the majority of his life in Europe, becoming a British citizen in after the outbreak of World War I. Does it help explain his unwillingness to marry, his mode of masculinity; or the various styles of his characters' unconventional masculinities?

This quotation has captured the imagination of literary biographers, scholars, and critics who have assessed James's career and, more broadly, considered the inner dynamics of American literature. In the S the novelist and critic Glenway Wescott embellished further, characterizing James as an artist inspired by his castration; Wescott made the claim in a complex passage in ':A Sentimental Contribution," which appeared in the issue of Harvard's Hound and Horn dedicated to James.

Taking advantage of nearly exclusive access to letters that James's family descendents had turned over to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the era's preerninentJamesian biographer, Leon Edel, wrote a five-volume biography that tried to sort out reminiscences and rumor to offer a more complete picture of his life. It is also'extraordinarily intimate' and at the same time 'awkwardly irrelevant.

Beyond these familial tensions, Edel's version of Henry James is a "man so cautious" that he '1eft no love letters" at least none that had been found "so far" -"indeed a man so cautious did not allow himself to be in love. Kaplan concludes that he fell in love several times, mostly with men to whom he confided intimate feelings in letters. Nevertheless, according to Kaplan, James never experienced any "overt sexual activity" with either men or women and was not capable of physical consummation.

Kaplan also notes that when traveling as a young man, James commented in letters home on the attractiveness of English and Italian men, an attraction that might not imply conscious sexual interest but that runs counter to his mother's encouragement to marry. As for the convention of marriage, writing to Grace Norton in December , James averred, "I shall not marry," and explained, "I am happy enough as it is, and am convinced that if I should go further, I would fare worse.

I am too good a bachelor to spoil. Novick claims to have decoded James's layered reminiscences about the spring of , declaring that in a "rooming house in Cambridge and in his own shuttered bedroom in Ashburton Place, Harry [Le. Supreme Court justice who had been wounded in the Civil War! As Hugh Stevens notes, "The question has been what to do in the absence of concrete evidence James's sexual experiences].

To conclude from this absence that Henry James must have remained virginal is regarded as proper scholarly caution, but it is of course to make a claim without any evidence. In his letters he often expresses fondness, warmth, and excitement for men in strikingly passionate and physical language. Any questions of physical intimacy are further complicated by cultural differences; for example, what might James's impressions have been of the terms of intimacy between male students at Oxford and Cambridge and British boarding schools in the mid-nineteenth century?

In the preface to HenryJames: The Mature Master, Novick does not present any specific new evidence of James's sexual activity, but he challenges the "canonical image" ofJames as "passive and detached," contending that he was instead "an active and engaged man, passionate and energetic, for whom relationships were the ground of life and the subject of his art.

His passion for writing fueled his determination to trust his pen. In the family moved from Newport to Boston's Ashburton Place, where in May of that year Henry wept upon hearing of the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who represented for him an American writer who had achieved international standing. On the morning of Henry's twenty-second birthday in , President Abraham Lincoln died from an assassin's bullet in the aftermath of the Civil War.

William heard the news upon landing in Brazil, where he then spent the year on the Thayer Expedition as an assistant to the famous Harvard paleontologist Louis Agassiz. William endured bouts of illness that rendered him quite miserable, even threatening his eyesight, but he stuck to the task of collecting specimens in the Amazon rainforest, keeping a diary and writing letters home.

Meanwhile Wilky and Bob followed up their soldiering with failed attempts to manage a plantation in Florida, backed financially by their father and Aunt Kate. They eventually moved west to Wisconsin, where they worked with railroad companies, struggling to find fulfillment in their careers and happiness as either husbands or fathers. Henry's literary efforts began to bear fruit when in February New York's Continental Monthly printed without attribution what Edel has identified as james's first published story, "A Tragedy of Error.

In March the Atlantic Monthly published James's first signed story, "The Story of a Year," about the disillusioning effects of war and injury on a youthful romance. Even at the start of his career and while in his early twenties, Henry's productivity was impressive, as Kaplan notes that between and James "published six of his stories and twenty-nine reviews," making enough money to support himself as he lived at homeY James moved with his family to Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and between and he continued to deepen the friendships that he would cherish throughout his trans-Atlantic adulthood.

Working up the courage and capital to go abroad on his own, he spent time with William Dean Howells, whose eventual editorship of the Atlantic Monthly from to shepherded many of James's early stories into print. James also cultivated professional relationships with the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, who served as editor of the North American Review from to , and with James T.

Fields, the influential publisher and editor of the Atlantic Monthly from to Norton's sister Grace became a dear lifelong friend to Henry, and so did Fields's young wife, Annie, who hosted writers and publishers for dinner and conversation at the Fieldses' home. James followed their tumultuous family life over the next two 27 decades, spending time with them during his first extended visits to Florence, Italy.

In February , with a line of credit and letters of introduction from his father, James embarked at the age of twenty-five on his first independent tour. Insisting in letters home on the health benefits of travel, he went to Germany, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, where he gathered his initial impressions of Florence, Rome, and Venice, all important settings in his subsequent fiction.

On his return to England, he learned of his beloved Minny's heartbreaking if not wholly unexpected death. While abroad he had been in close touch with Howells, who had succeeded James T. For the next two years he continued to write avidly, splitting his time between New York, Newport, and Vermont and plotting his return to Europe.

Touring England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and especially Italy, where he wrote sketches that appeared in the Nation and eventually constituted a substantial part of Italian Hours In Paris he met up with James Russell Lowell, the acclaimed elder poet who had been the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly in , and with Emerson, later to tour St.

Peter's Cathedral in Rome with him. In Italy James was thrilled to meet the famous British actress Fanny Kemble and her daughter Sarah Butler Wister, who became his horseback-riding partner on ventures through the Italian countryside. Subsequently in London Kemble and James became close friends until her death in Wearing down her father's disapproval, Lizzie eventually married the American painter Frank Duveneck, and they had a son.

Like Minny, she died tragically young. In October William joined Henry, and the two brothers briefly traveled together. Henry stayed abroad until September , writing his second novel, Roderick Hudson, which was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly when he returned to the United States in To afford a life in Europe, James needed to earn about three thousand dollars a year.

As his career unfolded, he worked with several publishers in the United States and England who attempted to profit by publishing periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly in the United States and Macmillan's in England and books of varying quality and prices both for individual buyers and for the very popular lending libraries in England, such as Mudie's Select Library and W.

To reach an audience James had to consider the oversight not only of book and magazine editors but also of librarians, most of them men, who evaluated the propriety of reading material for the largely female audience of the nineteenth-century noveL3 In November , at age thirty-two, James left for Paris hoping to become part of its innovative literary scene.

During the winter of he reported as a correspondent for New York's Tribune, then under the editorship of Horace Greeley's successor, Whitelaw Reid. Within the year, Reid pressed an unwilling James for more sensational anecdotes of Parisian life, and their agreement terminated. Unfortunately the literary salon culture of Paris also proved unsatisfying.

In his literary reviews, James put himself in conversation with the ideas of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. However, he did not embrace the French style of novel writing even though he read "a great deal" of what he called their "naturalism. He admired them for doing something innovative, but one can sense the limit to his admiration for the "young realists in fiction" in a letter to Howells: "They are all charming talkers.

As editor of the austere Atlantic it would startle you to hear some of their projected subjects. The other day [Goncourt] said he had been lately working very well on his novel-he had gotten upon an episode that greatly interested him Flaubert: 'What is it? Paris did have its bright spots. In April Turgenev introduced James to Paul Joukowsky, a young aristocratic painter and intellectual from Russia, with whom he "fell briefly in love.

According to Fred Kaplan, James "was appalled by the openly homosexual and adulterous activities of the Wagner entourage. His third novel presents a wealthy American businessman named Christopher Newman, whose romantic designs of marrying a Frenchwoman are thwarted by her family of haughty French aristocrats. Newman's frustration was unpopular with readers who followed the novel's Atlantic Monthly serialization, orchestrated by the editor Howells to begin in June and coincide with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

By November James had grown weary of Paris and plotted his escape. England became his home turf for the rest of his career; in his notebook on November 25, , he recalled arriving in December "I had very few friends, the season was of the darkest and wettest; but I was in a state of deep delight. I had complete liberty, and the prospect of profitable work; I used to take long walks in the rain.

I took possession of London; I felt it to be the right place. After the Philadelphia publisher Lippincott rejected the story for what James later speculated was its perceived "outrage on American girlhood," Leslie Stephen picked it up for British publication in Cornhill Magazine. Because the U. During this period he met men who would become very close friends, including the British critic, poet, and librarian Edmund Gosse and the Punch illustrator George du Maurier, who later confided to an encouraging James the germ for the sensationally best-selling novel Trilby Throughout his career James relished the work of cartoonists like du Maurier, John Leech, and George Cruikshank, whose images sparked his youthful imagination of Europe's places and people.

Though married, Symonds wrote about love and sex between men in the privately published treatises A Problem in Greek Ethics privately printed, and A Problem in Modern Ethics privately printed, James later used anecdotes about Symonds told to him by Gosse for the story "The Author of 'Beltraffio'" James also enjoyed his conversations with Fanny Kemble, who gave him the kernel of what would become Washington Square Having signed away his rights in an ill-conceived contract with the British publisher Macmillan, James received just one hundred pounds for the effortY He visited Florence, where he met the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, soon a close friend whose admiration he seemed to enjoy, and he worked on The Portrait of a Lady.

In November , as the final installment and the American and British book editions of The Portrait of a Lady appeared, James returned to the United States and spent the Christmas holidays with his family at Quincy Street in Cambridge. He met his new sister-in-law, William's wife, Alice Howe Gibbens. At the start of he took a train to Washington, D.

Adams later served as the editor of the North American Review and became a professor of history at Harvard as well as the president of the American Historical Society. In Washington James also met Oscar Wilde, who was touring the United States, sparring with sometimes hostile audiences in his role as an aesthete to promote Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience and his own career.

James was offended when Wilde seemed to treat their conversation as an occasion to exercise his wit. OnJanuary 22James received word that his mother was dying. She passed away on January 29, before he could get back to Cambridge. All five of her children were together to attend her funeral. In the aftermath, Henry Sr. Meanwhile Henry Jr. During the summer he managed to travel in France and write essays that would later appear in A Little Tour of France r Soon after William arrived in London, in September, they received word of their father's imminent death.

Henry headed back to the United States, after his father had passed away; on December 18, Yielding to his family's concern for his health and peace of mind, William agreed to remain in London and struggled to accept the loss of his father in accordance with their many conversations about the relief of passing beyond the mortal state. Henry became the executioner of his father's which forced him to sort through late revisions stipulating the inheritance of his younger brothers, Bob and Wilky-revisions probably advised by Aunt Kate, who felt that their financial failure in Florida should be accounted for.

Henry traveled to Milwaukee to reassure his brothers of his commitment to rework the will toward equal apportionment. To ensure Alice's comfort, he signed over to her the annual revenue about fifteen hundred dollars from his own share of the rents paid on the family property in Syracuse. Sadly he soon heard of his brother Wilky's death.

Henry james senior biography sample

In the midst of these losses, he continued to publish, including The Siege of London J. Osgood, and the collection of essays Portraits of Places Macmillan, He also began to think more seriously about writing for the theater. He joined the Reform Club, located in central London, which provided him a place to dine and converse with other men, a comfortable library, and temporary lodgings when necessary.

More important for his work overall may have been his position as an expatriate , and in other ways an outsider, living in Europe. While he came from middle-class and provincial beginnings seen from the perspective of European polite society , he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society, and the settings of his fiction range from working-class to aristocratic , and often describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to make their way in European capitals.

He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends. He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality.

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. Many of James's stories may also be seen as psychological thought experiments about selection. In his preface to the New York edition of The American , James describes the development of the story in his mind as exactly such: the "situation" of an American, "some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot In many of his tales, characters seem to exemplify alternative futures and possibilities, as most markedly in " The Jolly Corner ", in which the protagonist and a ghost-doppelganger live alternative American and European lives; and in others, like The Ambassadors, an older James seems fondly to regard his own younger self facing a crucial moment.

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. Although 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 vivid realisation 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. In The Portrait of a Lady , James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains his most popular piece of long fiction. The story is 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, The Portrait of a Lady is described as a psychological novel , exploring the minds of his characters, and almost a work of social science, exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans, the old and the new worlds.

The second period of James's career, which extends from the publication of The Portrait of a Lady through the end of the 19th century, features less popular novels, including The Princess Casamassima , published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in —, and The Bostonians , published serially in The Century during the same period. The third period of James's career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just around the start of the 20th century: The Wings of the Dove , The Ambassadors , and The Golden Bowl Critic F.

Matthiessen called this "trilogy" James's major phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study. The second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove , was the first published because it was not serialised. Some of these people befriend Milly with honourable 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". 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. At several points in his career, James wrote plays, beginning with one-act plays written for periodicals in and [ 84 ] and a dramatisation of his popular novella Daisy Miller in This play was performed for several years by a touring repertory company, and had a respectable run in London, but did not earn very much money for James.

His other plays written at this time were not produced. In , however, he responded to a request from actor-manager George Alexander for a serious play for the opening of his renovated St. James's Theatre, and wrote a long drama, Guy Domville , which Alexander produced. A noisy uproar arose on the opening night, 5 January , with hissing from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain, and the author was upset.

The play received moderately good reviews and had a modest run of four weeks before being taken off to make way for Oscar Wilde 's The Importance of Being Earnest , which Alexander thought would have better prospects for the coming season. After the stresses and disappointment of these efforts, James insisted that he would write no more for the theatre, but within weeks had agreed to write a curtain-raiser for Ellen Terry.

This became the one-act "Summersoft", which he later rewrote into a short story, "Covering End", and then expanded into a full-length play, The High Bid , which had a brief run in London in , when James made another concerted effort to write for the stage. He wrote three new plays, two of which were in production when the death of Edward VII on 6 May plunged London into mourning and theatres closed.

Discouraged by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work, James did not renew his efforts in the theatre, but recycled his plays as successful novels. The Outcry was a best-seller in the United States when it was published in During —, when he was most engaged with the theatre, James wrote a good deal of theatrical criticism, and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time in London.

Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was traumatised by the opening-night uproar that greeted Guy Domville , and that it plunged him into a prolonged depression. The successful later novels, in Edel's view, were the result of 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 more common view being that of F. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes [for the theatre] 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 , he argued against rigid prescriptions 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 critical articles on other novelists; typical is his book-length study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which has been the subject of critical debate. Richard Brodhead has suggested that the study was emblematic of James's struggle with Hawthorne's influence, and constituted an effort to place the elder writer "at a disadvantage.

When James assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years, he wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to searching, occasionally harsh criticism. He wrote, in all, over essays and book, art, and theatre reviews for the magazine. For most of his life, James harboured ambitions for success as a playwright.

He converted his novel The American into a play that enjoyed modest returns in the early s. 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 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 dramatise his characters' thoughts and emotions.

James produced a small amount of theatrical criticism, including appreciations of Henrik Ibsen. With his wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on the visual arts. He wrote a favourable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent , a painter whose critical status has improved markedly since the mid twentieth century.

James also wrote sometimes charming, sometimes brooding articles about various places where he visited and lived. His books of travel writing include Italian Hours an example of the charming approach and The American Scene on the brooding side. James was one of the great letter-writers of any era. More than 10, of his personal letters are extant, and over 3, have been published in a large number of collections.

A complete edition of James's letters began publication in , edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias. As of [update] , eight volumes have been published, covering from to The content of the letters range from trivialities to serious discussions of artistic, social, and personal issues. 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.

James's work has remained steadily popular with the limited audience of educated readers to whom he spoke during his lifetime, and has remained firmly in the canon, but after his death, some American critics, such as Van Wyck Brooks , expressed hostility towards James for his long expatriation and eventual naturalisation as a British subject.

Forster complained about what they saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly controversial material, or dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure, relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language. Jorge Luis Borges wrote about him, "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life.

Is there really any sense in it? Somerset Maugham wrote, "He did not know the English as an Englishman instinctively knows them and so his English characters never to my mind quite ring true," and argued, "The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately. Henry James was content to observe it from a window. His English characters don't work for me.

Despite these criticisms, James is now valued for his psychological and moral realism, his masterful creation of character, his low-key but playful humour, and his assured command of the language. 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. William Dean Howells saw James as a representative of a new realist school of literary art, which broke with the English romantic tradition epitomised by the works of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray.

Howells wrote that realism found "its chief exemplar in Mr. A novelist he is not, after the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own. Leavis championed Henry James as a novelist of "established pre-eminence" in The Great Tradition , asserting that The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were "the two most brilliant novels in the language.

Henry James has been the subject of a number of novels and stories, including: [ ]. Henry James's stories and novels have been adapted to film, television, and music video over times some TV shows did upwards of a dozen stories from to Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. During this extended development and shifting of interests and enthusiasms, James was continuously trying to refine his presentation of character, theme, and event. Several critics, perhaps the most famous being F. Others—perhaps the most salient is F. A fine example is his presentation of Mrs. It would, for example, be hard to think of another writer, who, in characterizing the grim conversation of Mrs.

Possibly the greatest shift of critical emphasis in James scholarship has been the increasing awareness of the moral thrust of his work. Early critics frequently charged that no consistent moral attitude was clearly expressed in his work. In later times, this concern evaporated, with a realization that James was an insightful moralist who understood that general rules are of little use in dealing with complex social and personal situations.

He tended to treat each novel as a sort of special problem, to be worked out by the characters. To become a true hero or heroine in a James novel, a character must achieve a state of self-realization again, an acute act of consciousness is needed , must recognize the truth and face it bravely, must act freely without emotional dependence on others , and must renounce any personal gain in order to promote the welfare of others.

In this way, the person attains true personal development and achieves as much freedom as James believed the world could offer—he did not subscribe to the doctrine that human liberty is unlimited. There is no question that James belongs, in F. The story is an uncomplicated one, from the standpoint of plot. Frederick Winterbourne, a sophisticated young American who lives in Europe, meets Daisy Miller , who is visiting Europe with her mother and younger brother; Mr.

Miller is back in Schenectady, New York, presumably making enough money to allow his family to travel comfortably. Costello, his aunt, and Mrs. Walker, another Europeanized American society matron it is significant that the people who most condemn Daisy are not native Europeans but expatriates. The complexity of the moral nuances of the story is revealed when one remembers that Winterbourne, who is regarded as quite the perfect young gentleman and is welcomed in the best society, has a mistress back in Geneva.

The old theme of appearance versus reality thus emerges in this story, but with social implications not found in the work of other authors. To James, one of the most difficult problems for Americans trying to come to terms with Europe is that the appearance of virtue often counts for more than the reality. This problem is seen quite plainly in The Reverberator, written ten years later, in which an American businessman is puzzled that a French family is upset over some scandalous things said about them in a newspaper; so far as he is concerned, such things do not matter so long as they are not true.

He regrets that he did not try harder to understand her and correct her misconceptions. Lydia Touchett, her wealthy aunt who lives in Europe and, then, a great deal of money provided by the will of Mr. Daniel Touchett, at the suggestion of his son Ralph, who becomes very fond of Isabel. This combination of high connections—Mr. In The Portrait of a Lady , James studies the relationships of the characters in great detail.