Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916), American writer who spent most of his adult life living in Britain. In his fiction, he emphasized the psychological dramas of his characters rather than the machinations of plot, which made him one of the most important precursors of Modernist writing. James was born on April 15, 1843, in Washington Place, New York, and received an erratic education in New York, London, Paris, Boulogne, and Geneva. His father was a well-known theological writer and unorthodox thinker, a follower of the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg, and his elder brother, William James, became a distinguished philosopher. In 1862, Henry entered law school at Harvard, and lived with his parents in Cambridge, outside Boston. Both Harvard and Cambridge are remembered in The Bostonians (1886), as is the New York of the late 19th-century.

The law was not to be James's calling, and from 1865 he contributed reviews and sketches to the periodical press. He was greatly helped in this endeavour by his friend the novelist, William Dean Howells, who introduced his work to the magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. James's first novel, Watch and Ward, was serialized from 1871. In 1869 and in 1872, he made trips as a tourist to Europe, staying in Rome, Florence, and Paris. In 1875 he finally left America and took up residence in Paris for a year, before moving to London in 1876, when he published Roderick Hudson. The American followed in 1877, The Europeans in 1878, and the immediately popular novella Daisy Miller in 1879. All these books focus on the relationship between the new, American world and the old, European one. In 1881 the elegant novella, Washington Square, was published; the story of a battle of will between a father and a daughter, it was written in haste to finance James's work on a longer book, “told in a more spacious, expansive way than its predecessors”, as he told his brother, William.

This was The Portrait of a Lady (1881), one of James's best-loved books, in which Isabel Archer, a young American, turns down an offer of marriage to an English lord, and instead accepts Gilbert Osmond, a fastidious collector of fine things. James's rendering of the delicate psychological torture of an unhappy marriage is exquisite. Even early in his writing career, James was experimental in his treatment of psychological subjects, and uses startling, material images to represent the intangible psychological state of his characters. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel envies Madame Merle, for instance, for her invulnerability, for having made herself into “a firm surface, a sort of corselet of silver”; and in The Bostonians (1886), Olive Chancellor in Henry Burrage's rooms sits “dumbly shaking her conscience like a watch that wouldn't go”. In contrast to his earlier work, which followed well-born Americans and Europeans around their opulent world, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima (both 1886), are novels which engage with wider political and social issues. The Bostonians has the issue of women's suffrage at its centre, and The Princess Casamassima deals, albeit somewhat improbably, with a group of radical revolutionaries.

Between 1890 and 1894 James made a concentrated attempt to write for the theatre. He wrote several plays but, although some were produced, they failed to catch the imagination of the theatre-going public. James never forgot the humiliation of being booed on the first night of Guy Domville (1895), and he returned to fiction writing. In 1895 and 1896, he wrote some of his best-known short stories, including “The Death of the Lion”, “The Middle Years”, and “The Figure in the Carpet”. His next novel appeared in 1897, The Spoils of Poynton, in which a mother clashes with her son over his choice of wife. What Maisie Knew was published in the same year, an extraordinary novel written entirely from the perspective of a child witnessing her parents' divorce and their appalling subsequent behaviour. James took the plot from an anecdote he was told at a dinner party, but later remarked in the Preface: “I am not sure its possibility of interest would so much have appealed to me had I not soon felt that the ugly facts, so stated or conceived, by no means constituted the whole appeal.” The “ugly facts” in a James novel never “constitute the whole appeal”: the plots of his books, and particularly his later books, can be summarized in a sentence. The complexity of his writing reveals the motives and behaviour of his characters obliquely by means of their conversations and through their minute observations of one another. It may be significant, too, that halfway through What Maisie Knew James started to dictate all his work to his secretary, as he was suffering from severe writer's cramp. This is thought to have encouraged the natural amplitude of his prose, which piles sub-clause upon sub-clause to produce an effect of extreme complexity and, sometimes, of obscurity.

In 1898 the immensely popular ghost story, “The Turn of the Screw” was published. In the same year James moved out of London and into Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, although he retained a room at the Reform Club. 1899 saw the publication of one of his most difficult novels, The Awkward Age, in which James retires completely as narrator and tells his story solely through conversations between characters.

James recorded his sadness and apprehension upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901: “It's a new era—and we don't know what it is.” It was as an Edwardian, though, not as a Victorian, that James produced his finest work; The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). These three novels are generally considered James's masterpieces: they display a new emotional intensity. His earlier work is elegant and technically innovative, but has nothing to compare to the poignancy of Milly Theale's death in The Wings of the Dove, or the description of the tragicomic, middle-aged figure of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors.

In 1905, James visited America again after a long absence, and in 1906 he published The American Scene. From 1907 onwards, he was engaged in revising his fiction for the New York editions, and writing “Prefaces” to the novels, in each of which he describes their genesis and his artistic aims. Throughout his career James wrote perceptive critical essays; he criticized Dickens for a lack of psychological depth, but admired George Eliot, and, above all, Honoré de Balzac, whom he called “the master of us all”. A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) are autobiographical recollections of his early life. In 1914 he began two long novels that were never to be finished: The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past. James was terribly shocked by the outbreak of World War I: “It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way”, he wrote to the novelist Rhoda Broughton. In 1915 he became a British subject and in 1916 he was awarded the Order of Merit. He died the same year in London. In an extraordinarily prolific literary career, he had produced more than 20 novels, and numerous essays, short stories, and plays. His fiction bridges the period between confident Victorian realism and the Modernist writing that was to emerge after the end of World War I.