Henry James (April 15, 1843 – February 28, 1916), son of Henry James Sr. and brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author and literary critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his life in Europe and became a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for novels, novellas and short stories based on themes of consciousness and morality.
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James spent the last 40 years of his life in England and became a British subject in 1915. He is primarily known for a series of major novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans. His plots center on personal relationships, the proper exercise of power in such relationships, and other moral questions. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore the phenomena of consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. 
Author Henry James
Henry James was born on April 15, 1843 in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr. was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America. In his youth James traveled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn. At the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law. James published his first short story, A Tragedy of Errors two years later, and devoted himself to literature. In 1866–69 and 1871–72 he was a contributor to The Nation and Atlantic Monthly.
From an early age James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature and Russian classics in translation. His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), was written while he was traveling through Venice and Paris. After living in Paris, where he was contributor to the New York Tribune, James moved to England in 1876, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex. During his first years in Europe James wrote novels that portrayed Americans living abroad. In 1905 James visited America for the first time in twenty-five years, and wrote "Jolly Corner".
Among James's masterpieces are Daisy Miller (1879); in which the eponymous protagonist, the young and innocent American Daisy Miller, finds her values in conflict with European sophistication; and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which once again a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe. The Bostonians (1886) is set in the era of the rising feminist movement. What Maisie Knew (1897) depicts a preadolescent girl, who must choose between her parents and a motherly old governess. In The Wings of the Dove (1902) an inheritance destroys the love of a young couple. James considered The Ambassadors (1903) his most "perfect" work of art. James's most famous short story is The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story in which the question of childhood corruption obsesses a governess. Although James is best known for his novels, his essays are now attracting a more general audience. 
Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and novels for the New York edition of his complete works. His autobiography, A Small Boy And Others, appeared in 1913 and was continued in Notes Of A Son And Brother (1914). The third volume, The Middle Years, appeared posthumously in 1917. The outbreak of World War I was a shock for James, and on July 26, 1915 he became a British citizen as a declaration of loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against the America's refusal to enter the war. James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915, and died in London on February 28, 1916. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes are interred at Cambridge, Massachusetts.Early career
James early established the precedent of pursuing his career as a man of letters. His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket," published in 1863, that reflected a life-long interest in the actor's art. From an early age James read, criticized, and learned from the classics of English, American, French, Italian, German and (in translation) Russian literature. In 1863, he anonymously published his first short story, A Tragedy of Error. Until his fiftieth year he supported himself by writing, principally by contributing extensively to illustrated monthly magazines in the United States and Great Britain, but after his sister's death in 1892 his royalties were supplemented by a modest income from the family's properties in Syracuse, New York.
Until late in life his novels were serialized in magazines before book publication, and he wrote the monthly installments as they were due, allowing him little opportunity to revise the final work. To supplement his income he also wrote frequently for newspapers, and from 1863 to his death he maintained a strenuous schedule of publication in a variety of genres and media. In his criticism of fiction, the theater, and painting he developed ideas concerning the unity of the arts; he wrote two full-length biographies, two volumes of memoirs of his childhood and a long fragment of autobiography; 22 novels, including two left unfinished at his death, 112 tales of varying lengths, fifteen plays, and dozens of travel and topical essays.
Biographers and critics have identified Henrik Ibsen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, and Ivan Turgenev as important influences. He heavily revised his major novels and many of his stories for a selected edition of his fiction, whose twenty-three volumes formed an artistic autobiography which he called "The New York Edition" to emphasize his continuing ties to the city of his birth. In his essay The Art of Fiction, and in prefaces to each volume of The New York Edition, James explained his views of the art of fiction, emphasizing the importance to him of realist portrayals of character as seen through the eyes and thoughts of an embodied narrator.
At several points in his career James wrote plays, beginning with one-act plays written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871 and a dramatization of his popular novella Daisy Miller in 1882. From 1890 to 1892, he made a concerted effort to succeed commercially on the London stage, writing a half-dozen plays of which only one, a dramatization of his novel The American, was produced. 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. The effort was made avowedly to improve his finances, and after his sister Alice's death in 1892, as he had a modest independent income, he halted his theatrical efforts. In 1893, 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 James wrote a long drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander produced. There was a noisy uproar on the opening night, January 5, 1895, with hissing from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain, and the author was considerably upset. The incident was not repeated, the play received good reviews, and had a modest run of five weeks and was then 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 this effort James insisted that he would write no more for the theater, 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 1907, 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 May 6, 1910 plunged London into mourning and the theaters were closed. Discouraged by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work, James did not renew his efforts in the theater, but recycled his plays as successful novels. The Outcry was a best-seller in the United States when it was published in 1911. During the years 1890-1893 when he was most engaged with the theater, James wrote a good deal of theatrical criticism and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time on the London stage.
Biographer Leon Edel was the first to call attention to the importance of the "theatrical years" 1890–1895 for James's later work. Following the commercial failure of his novel The Tragic Muse, in 1890, James renounced novel writing and dedicated himself to short fiction and plays, which he described as related forms. Between 1890 and 1895, he sketched in his notebooks plots and themes of nearly all his later novels, which he first conceived as short stories or plays. The structure of his late novels was "scenic" in James's special sense, in that they followed the scene-by-scene structure of a French play in the classical mode, and he freely translated short stories into plays and vice versa. The use of an observer's consciousness and the sense of the action as a performance became most marked in James's fiction in and after the 1890s. Failing to make a commercial success on the stage, however, and finding that the stresses of theatrical work were difficult for him to sustain, he returned to the writing of long, serialized novels, which again became the mainstay of his income. With his new private income as well, he was able to maintain a country house and rooms in London.
Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was deeply traumatized 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 James's fiction, which partly freed him from his fears. Other biographers and scholars have not accepted this account, however; the more common view being that of F.O. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes [for the theater]. . . he felt a resurgence of new energy."
James returned to the United States in 1904–1905 for a lecture tour to recoup his finances and to visit his family. His essays describing that visit, published as The American Scene, were perhaps his most important work of social commentary. In them he described the rise of commerce and democracy, the impact of free immigration on American culture, and his agonized sense that his deeply felt American nationality was threatened by these upheavals.Novels
Although any selection of James's novels as "major" must inevitably depend to some extent on personal preference, the following books have achieved prominence among his works in the views of many critics.
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. Roderick Hudson (1875) is a bildungsroman that traces the development of the title character, an extremely talented sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of immaturity—this was James's first serious attempt at a full-length novel — it has attracted favorable comment due to the vivid realization 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 femme 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.
Although Roderick Hudson featured mostly American characters in a European setting, James made the Europe–America contrast even more explicit in his next novel. In fact, the contrast could be considered the leading theme of The American (1877). This book is a combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th century American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of Europe, and learns not to take either for granted.
James did not set all of his novels in Europe or focus exclusively on the contrast between the New World and the Old. Set in New York City, Washington Square (1880) is a deceptively simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. The book is often compared to Jane Austen's work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships. James was not particularly enthusiastic about Jane Austen, so he might not have regarded the comparison as flattering. In fact, James was not enthusiastic about Washington Square itself. He tried to read it over for inclusion in the New York Edition of his fiction (1907–09) but found that he could not. So he excluded the novel from the edition. But other readers have enjoyed the book enough to make it one of the more popular works in the entire Jamesian canon.
With The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains to this day his most popular long fiction, if the Amazon sales rankings are any indication. This impressive achievement is the story 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. Set mostly in Europe, notably England and Italy, and generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, this novel is not just a reflection of James's absorbing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old. The book also treats in a profound way the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal and sexuality.
In the 1880s James began to explore new areas of interest besides the Europe–America contrast and the "American girl". In particular, he began writing on explicitly political themes. The Bostonians (1886) is a bittersweet tragicomedy that centers on an odd triangle of characters: Basil Ransom, an unbending political conservative from Mississippi; Olive Chancellor, Ransom's cousin and a zealous Boston feminist; and Verena Tarrant, a pretty protege of Olive's in the feminist movement. The story line concerns the contest between Ransom and Olive for Verena's allegiance and affection, though the novel also includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and quirky eccentrics.
The political theme turned darker in The Princess Casamassima (1886), the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. The book is something of a lone sport in the Jamesian canon for dealing with such a violent political subject. But it is often paired with The Bostonians, which is concerned with political issues in a less tragic manner.
Just as James was beginning his ultimately disastrous attempt to conquer the stage, he wrote The Tragic Muse (1890). This novel offers a wide, cheerful panorama of English life and follows the fortunes of two would-be artists: Nick Dormer, who vacillates between a political career and his efforts to become a painter, and Miriam Rooth, an actress striving for artistic and commercial success. A huge cast of supporting characters help and hinder their pursuits. The book reflects James's consuming interest in the theater and is often considered to mark the close of the second or middle phase of his career in the novel.
After the failure of his "dramatic experiment" James returned to his fiction with a deeper, more incisive approach. He began to probe his characters' consciousness in a more insightful manner, which had been foreshadowed in such passages as Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. His style also started to grow in complexity to reflect the greater depth of his analysis. The Spoils of Poynton (1897), considered the first example of this final phase, is a half-length novel that describes the struggle between Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, and her son Owen over a houseful of precious antique furniture. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch, a young woman in love with Owen but sympathetic to Mrs Gereth's anguish over losing the antiques she patiently collected.
James continued the more involved, psychological approach to his fiction with What Maisie Knew (1897), the story of the sensitive daughter of divorced and irresponsible parents. The novel has great contemporary relevance as an unflinching account of a wildly dysfunctional family. The book is also a notable technical achievement by James, as it follows the title character from earliest childhood to precocious maturity.
The third period of James's career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just after the turn of the century. Critic F.O. Mathiessen called this "trilogy" James's major phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study. Although it was the second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove (1902) was the first published. This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honorable 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". 
The next published of the three novels, The Ambassadors (1903), is a dark comedy that follows the trip of protagonist Louis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son. Strether is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view. In his preface to the New York Edition text of the novel, James placed this book at the top of his achievements, which has occasioned some critical disagreement. The Golden Bowl (1904) is a complex, intense study of marriage and adultery that completes the "major phase" and, essentially, James's career in the novel. The book explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail and powerful insight.Short stories
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.
Just as the contrast between Europe and America was a predominant theme in James's early novels, many of his first tales also explored the clash between the Old World and the New. In "A Passionate Pilgrim" (1871), the earliest fiction that James included in the New York Edition, the difference between America and Europe erupts into open conflict, which leads to a sadly ironic ending. The story's technique still seems somewhat inexpert, with passages of local color description occasionally interrupting the flow of the narrative. But James manages to craft an interesting and believable example of what he would call the "Americano-European legend".
James published many stories before what would prove to be his greatest success with the readers of his time, "Daisy Miller" (1878). This story portrays the confused courtship of the title character, a free-spirited American girl, by Winterbourne, a compatriot of hers with much more sophistication. His pursuit of Daisy is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates they meet in Switzerland and Italy. Her lack of understanding of the social mores of the society she so desperately wishes to enter ultimately leads to tragedy.
As James moved on from studies of the Europe-America clash and the American girl in his novels, his shorter works also explored new subjects in the 1880s. "The Aspern Papers" (1888) is one of James's best-known and most acclaimed longer tales. The storyline is based on an anecdote that James heard about a Lord Byron devotee who tried to obtain some valuable letters written by the poet. Set in a brilliantly described Venice, the story demonstrates James's ability to generate almost unbearable suspense while never neglecting the development of his characters. Another fine example of the middle phase of James's career in short narrative is "The Pupil" (1891), the story of a precocious young boy growing up in a mendacious and dishonorable family. He befriends his tutor, who is the only adult in his life that he can trust. James presents their relationship with sympathy and insight, and the story reaches what some have considered the status of classical tragedy.
The final phase of James's short narratives shows the same characteristics as the final phase of his novels: a more involved style, a deeper psychological approach, and a sharper focus on his central characters. Probably his most popular short narrative among today's readers, "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) is a ghost story that has lent itself well to operatic and film adaptation. With its possibly ambiguous content and powerful narrative technique, the story challenges the reader to determine if the protagonist, an unnamed governess, is correctly reporting events or is instead an unreliable neurotic with an overheated imagination. To further muddy the waters, her written account of the experience—a frame tale—is being read many years later at a Christmas house party by someone who claims to have known her.
"The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) is almost universally considered one of James's finest short narratives, and has often been compared with The Ambassadors in its meditation on experience or the lack of it. The story also treats other universal themes: loneliness, fate, love and death. The parable of John Marcher and his peculiar destiny speaks to anyone who has speculated on the worth and meaning of human life. Among his last efforts in short narrative, "The Jolly Corner" (1908) is usually held to be one of James's best ghost stories. The tale describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty New York house where he grew up. Brydon encounters a "sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."Themes and style
James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from different worlds—the Old World (Europe), simultaneously artistic, corrupting, and alluring; and the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive—and explore how this clash of personalities and cultures affects the two worlds.
He favored internal, psychological drama, and his work is often about conflicts between imaginative protagonists and their difficult environments. As his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work:
When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light... His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.
His earlier work is considered realist because of the carefully described details of his characters' physical surroundings. But throughout his long career James maintained a strong interest in a variety of artistic effects and movements. His work gradually became more metaphorical and symbolic as he entered more deeply into the minds of his characters. In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James's later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th century fiction.
In the late 20th century, many of James's novels were filmed by the team of Ismail Merchant & James Ivory, and this period saw a small resurgence of interest in his works. Among the best known of these are the short works "Daisy Miller", Washington Square and "The Turn of the Screw", and the novels The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors and The American.
The prose of James's later works is frequently marked by long, digressive sentences that defer the verb and include many qualifying adverbs, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. James seemed to change from a fairly straightforward style in his earlier writing to a more elaborate manner in his later works. Biographers have noted that the change of style occurred at approximately the time that James began dictating his fiction to a secretary.
Henry James was afflicted with a mild stutter. He overcame this by cultivating the habit of speaking very slowly and deliberately. Since he believed that good writing should resemble the conversation of an intelligent man, the process of dictating his works may perhaps account for a shift in style from direct to conversational sentences. The resulting prose style is at times baroque. His friend Edith Wharton, who admired him greatly, said that there were some passages in his works which were all but incomprehensible. His short fiction, such as "The Aspern Papers" and "The Turn of the Screw", is often considered to be more readable than the longer novels, and early works tend to be more accessible than later ones.
"The Turn of the Screw", however, is itself one of James's later works. Broad-brush comments about the "accessibility" of James's fiction are suspect, at best. Many of his later short stories—"Europe", "Paste" and "Mrs. Medwin", for instance—are briefer and more straightforward in style than some tales of his earlier years.
For much of his life James was an expatriate, an outsider, living in Europe. Much of The Portrait of a Lady was written while he lived in Venice, a city whose beauty he found distracting; he was better pleased with the small town of Rye in England. This feeling of being an American in Europe came through as a recurring theme in his books, which contrasted American innocence (or a lack of sophistication) with European sophistication (or decadence)
He made only a modest living from his books, yet was often the houseguest of the wealthy. James had grown up in a well-to-do family, and he was able to enter into this world for many of the impressions and observations he would eventually include in his fiction. (He said he got some of his best story ideas from dinner table gossip.) He was a man whose sexuality was uncertain and whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine. William Faulkner once referred to James as "the nicest old lady I ever met." In a similar vein Thomas Hardy called James and Robert Louis Stevenson "virtuous females" when he read their unfavorable comments about Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Percy Lubbock's 1920 collection of James's letters. Teddy Roosevelt also criticized James for his supposed lack of masculinity. Oddly, when James toured America in 1904-05, he met Roosevelt—who James dubbed "Theodore Rex" and called "a dangerous and ominous jingo"—at a White House dinner. The two men chatted amiably and at length, as if they were the best of friends.
It is often asserted that James's being a permanent outsider in so many ways may have helped him in his detailed psychological analysis of situations—one of the strongest features of his writing. He was never a full member of any camp. (See The Princess Casamassima, especially the Princess's comment that Hyacinth is doomed to looking at the world through a sheet of glass.) In his review of Van Wyck Brooks's The Pilgrimage of Henry James, critic Edmund Wilson noted James's detached, objective viewpoint and made a startling comparison:
One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. 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.
It is possible to see many of James's stories as psychological thought-experiments. The Portrait of a Lady may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich; alternatively, it has been suggested that the storyline was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection. The novella The Turn of the Screw describes the psychological history of an unmarried (and, according to some critics, sexually repressed and possibly unbalanced) young governess. The unnamed governess stumbles into a terrifying, ambiguous situation involving her perceptions of the ghosts of a now-dead couple: her predecessor Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel's lover, Peter Quint.Nonfiction
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 (1884), he argued against rigid proscriptions 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 valuable critical articles on other novelists; typical is his insightful book-length study of his American predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne. When he assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years, James wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to the same searching, occasionally harsh criticism.
For most of his life James harbored ambitions for success as a playwright. He converted his novel The American into a play that enjoyed modest returns in the early 1890s. 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 1895. 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 dramatize his characters' thoughts and emotions. James produced a small but valuable amount of theatrical criticism, including perceptive appreciations of Henrik Ibsen.
With his wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on the visual arts. Perhaps his most valuable contribution was his favorable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent, a painter whose critical status has improved markedly in recent decades. James also wrote sometimes charming, sometimes brooding articles about various places he visited and lived in. His most famous books of travel writing include Italian Hours (an example of the charming approach) and The American Scene (most definitely on the brooding side).
James was one of the great letter-writers of any era. More than ten thousand of his personal letters are extant, and over three thousand have been published in a large number of collections. A complete edition of the letters is scheduled for publication beginning in 2006. James's correspondents included celebrated contemporaries like Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad, along with many others in his wide circle of friends. The letters range from the "mere twaddle of graciousness" to serious discussions of artistic, social and personal issues. Very late in life James began a series of autobiographical works: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the unfinished The Middle Years. 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.Personal life
James never married, and after settling in London proclaimed himself "a bachelor" and regularly rejected suggestions that he marry. After his death, critics speculated on the cause of his bachelorhood. F. W. Dupee, in several well-regarded volumes on the James family, originated the theory that James had been in love with his cousin Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism . . . was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir A Small Boy and Others, recounting a dream of a Napoleonic images in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled. This analysis seemed to support literary critics like Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington who had condemned James's expatriation, and who criticized his work as effeminate and deracinated. Leon Edel used it as the premise of his own masterly biography, which held the field for many years. Dupee had not been given access to the James family papers, however, and had worked principally from James's published memoir of his older brother, and the limited collection of letters edited by Percy Lubbock, which was heavily weighted toward James's last years. Dupee's account, perhaps as a result, portrayed James as a man moving directly from childhood, when he trailed after his older brother, to an elderly invalidism.
As more material became available to scholars, including the diaries of contemporaries and hundreds of affectionate and sometimes erotic letters written by James to younger men, the picture of neurotic celibacy gave way to a portrait of a closeted homosexual. As author Terry Eagleton has stated, "...gay critics debate exactly how repressed his (possible) homosexuality was..." James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of May 6, 1904 to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry". How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers, but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasi-erotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment." To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile I can only try to live without you," and it is only in letters to young gay men that James refers to himself as their "lover". James wrote to young men who are now thought to have been homosexual or bisexual, who made up a large fraction of his close male friends. In a letter to Howard Sturgis, following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two". In letters to Hugh Walpole, James pursues involved jokes and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who "paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well meaning old trunk". The privately printed letters to Walter Berry have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism.
However, James wrote to fellow-novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others." In another example he wrote to his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Jones:
Dearest Mary Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me 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 a wrong impression, or a "colourable pretext"...However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life...
His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Leon Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon. Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness. Gordon builds on Edel's account and adds her own speculation that James felt guilt at having sabotaged Woolson's work. Woolson's biographers have strongly objected to Edel's account, however, and have generally portrayed James as a friend who advanced Woolson's career. Novick in his more recent account argues that the available evidence shows that James suffered strong emotions prompted by the apparent suicide of a friend and colleague, but that there is no evidence Woolson was in love with him or that he was the cause of her death.Legacy
Perhaps the most prominent examples of James's legacy in recent years have been the film versions of several of his novels and stories. The Merchant-Ivory movies were mentioned earlier, but a number of other filmmakers have based productions on James's fiction. The Iain Softley-directed version of The Wings of the Dove (1997) was successful with both critics and audiences. Helena Bonham Carter received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her memorable portrayal of Kate Croy. Jane Campion tried her hand with The Portrait of a Lady (1996) but with much less success. In earlier times Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) brought "The Turn of the Screw"' to vivid life on film, and William Wyler's The Heiress (1949) did the same for Washington Square.
James has also influenced his fellow novelists. In fact, there has been a recent spate of "James books", as mentioned above. Such disparate writers as Joyce Carol Oates with Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly (1994), Louis Auchincloss with The Ambassadress (1950), and Tom Stoppard with The Real Thing (1982) were explicitly influenced by James's works. James was definitely out of his element when it came to music, but Benjamin Britten's operatic version of "The Turn of the Screw" (1954) has become one of the composer's most popular works. William Tuckett converted the story into a ballet in 1999.
Even when the influence is not so obvious, James can cast a powerful spell. In 1954, when the shades of depression were thickening fast, Ernest Hemingway wrote an emotional letter where he tried to steady himself as he thought James would: "Pretty soon I will have to throw this away so I better try to be calm like Henry James. Did you ever read Henry James? He was a great writer who came to Venice and looked out the window and smoked his cigar and thought." The odd, perhaps subconscious or accidental allusion to "The Aspern Papers" is striking. And there are the real oddities, like the Rolls-Royce ad which used Strether's famous words: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to." That's more than a little ironic, considering The Ambassadors' sardonic treatment of the "great new force" of advertising.Henry James books in order
Watch and Ward (1871)
Roderick Hudson (1875)
The American (1877)
The Europeans (1878)
Confidence (1879)
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
The Reverberator (1888)
The Tragic Muse (1890)
The Other House (1896)
The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Sacred Fount (1901)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Whole Family (1908)
The Outcry (1911)
The Ivory Tower (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
The Sense of the Past (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)Short stories and novellas
A Tragedy of Error (1864)
The Story of a Year (1865)
A Landscape Painter (1866)
A Day of Days (1866)
My Friend Bingham (1867)
Poor Richard (1867)
The Story of a Masterpiece (1868)
A Most Extraordinary Case (1868)
A Problem (1868)
De Grey: A Romance (1868)
Osborne's Revenge (1868)
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
A Light Man (1869)
Gabrielle de Bergerac (1869)
Travelling Companions (1870)
A Passionate Pilgrim (1871)
At Isella (1871)
Master Eustace (1871)
Guest's Confession (1872)
The Madonna of the Future (1873)
The Sweetheart of M. Briseux (1873)
The Last of the Valerii (1874)
Madame de Mauves (1874)
Adina (1874)
Professor Fargo (1874)
Eugene Pickering (1874)
Benvolio (1875)
Crawford's Consistency (1876)
The Ghostly Rental (1876)
Four Meetings (1877)
Rose-Agathe (1878, as Théodolinde)
Daisy Miller (1878)
Longstaff's Marriage (1878)
An International Episode (1878)
The Pension Beaurepas (1879)
A Diary of a Man of Fifty (1879)
A Bundle of Letters (1879)
The Point of View (1882)
The Siege of London (1883)
Impressions of a Cousin (1883)
Lady Barbarina (1884)
Pandora (1884)
The Author of Beltraffio (1884)
Georgina's Reasons (1884)
A New England Winter (1884)
The Path of Duty (1884)
Mrs. Temperly (1887)
Louisa Pallant(1888)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
The Liar (1888)
A Modern Warning (1888)
A London Life (1888)
The Patagonia (1888)
The Lesson of the Master (1888)
The Solution (1888)
The Pupil (1891)
Brooksmith (1891)
The Marriages (1891)
The Chaperon (1891)
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
Nona Vincent (1892)
The Real Thing (1892)
The Private Life (1892)
Lord Beaupré (1892)
The Visits (1892)
Sir Dominick Ferrand (1892)
Greville Fane (1892)
Collaboration (1892)
Owen Wingrave (1892)
The Wheel of Time (1892)
The Middle Years (1893)
The Death of the Lion (1894)
The Coxon Fund (1894)
The Next Time (1895)
Glasses (1896)
The Altar of the Dead (1895)
The Figure in the Carpet (1896)
The Way It Came (1896)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Covering End (1898)
In the Cage (1898)
John Delavoy (1898)
The Given Case (1898)
Europe (1899)
The Great Condition (1899)
The Real Right Thing (1899)
Paste (1899)
The Great Good Place (1900)
Maud-Evelyn (1900)
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (1900)
The Tree of Knowledge (1900)
The Abasement of the Northmores (1900)
The Third Person (1900)
The Special Type (1900)
The Tone of Time (1900)
Broken Wings (1900)
The Two Faces (1900)
Mrs. Medwin (1901)
The Beldonald Holbein (1901)
The Story in It (1902)
Flickerbridge (1902)
The Birthplace (1903)
The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
The Papers (1903)
Fordham Castle (1904)
Julia Bride (1908)
The Jolly Corner (1908)
The Velvet Glove (1909)
Mora Montravers (1909)
Crapy Cornelia (1909)
The Bench of Desolation (1909)
A Round of Visits (1910)Autobiographies
A Small Boy and Others (1913)
Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)
The Middle Years (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)Plays
Theatricals (1894)
Theatricals: Second Series (1895)
Guy Domville (1895)Biographies
Hawthorne (1879)
William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)Other works
Captaine John Smith (1867)
A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875)
Transatlantic Sketches (1875)
French Poets and Novelists (1878)
Portraits of Places (1883)[52]
A Little Tour in France (1884)
Partial Portraits (1888)
Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893)
Picture and Text (1893)
Terminations (1893)
The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893)
The Soft Side (1900)
The Better Sort (1903)
English Hours (1905)
The American Scene (1907)
Views and Reviews (1908)
New York Edition (1907–1909)
Easton Press Henry James books
Washington Square - 1971
The Turn of The Screw - 1977
The Portrait of a Lady - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 1978
The Ambassadors - 1979
The Portrait of a Lady - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 1978
The Ambassadors - 1979
Daisy Miller a Study - The Collector's Library of Famous Editions - 1998
Six volume set including:
The Ambassadors
The Bostonians
The Europeans
The Turn of The Screw
The Golden Bowl
Washington Square
Franklin Library Henry James books
Nine Tales by Henry James - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1977
The Ambassadors - Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century - 1979
Selected Tales of Henry James - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1979
The Ambassadors - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1980
The Ambassadors - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1981
The Portrait of a Lady - World's Best Loved Books - 1983
Seven Tales by Henry James - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1983
Selected Tales - World's Best Loved Books - 1984
Six volume set including:
The Ambassadors
The Bostonians
The Europeans
The Turn of The Screw
The Golden Bowl
Washington Square
Franklin Library Henry James books
Nine Tales by Henry James - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1977The Ambassadors - Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century - 1979
Selected Tales of Henry James - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1979
The Ambassadors - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1980
The Ambassadors - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1981
The Portrait of a Lady - World's Best Loved Books - 1983
Seven Tales by Henry James - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1983
Selected Tales - World's Best Loved Books - 1984
The Portrait of a Lady - Oxford Library of The World's Greatest Books - 1984
Ghostly Tales - Library of Mystery Masterpieces - 1989
Ghostly Tales - Library of Mystery Masterpieces - 1989
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James spent the last 40 years of his life in England and became a British subject in 1915. He is primarily known for a series of major novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans. His plots center on personal relationships, the proper exercise of power in such relationships, and other moral questions. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore the phenomena of consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting.
James maintained that writers in English should enjoy the greatest freedom possible in presenting their views, as French authors did. His imaginative use of literary point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to realistic fiction, and foreshadowed Twentieth Century modernism. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales.
Author Henry James
Henry James was born on April 15, 1843 in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr. was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America. In his youth James traveled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn. At the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law. James published his first short story, A Tragedy of Errors two years later, and devoted himself to literature. In 1866–69 and 1871–72 he was a contributor to The Nation and Atlantic Monthly.From an early age James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature and Russian classics in translation. His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), was written while he was traveling through Venice and Paris. After living in Paris, where he was contributor to the New York Tribune, James moved to England in 1876, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex. During his first years in Europe James wrote novels that portrayed Americans living abroad. In 1905 James visited America for the first time in twenty-five years, and wrote "Jolly Corner".
Among James's masterpieces are Daisy Miller (1879); in which the eponymous protagonist, the young and innocent American Daisy Miller, finds her values in conflict with European sophistication; and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which once again a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe. The Bostonians (1886) is set in the era of the rising feminist movement. What Maisie Knew (1897) depicts a preadolescent girl, who must choose between her parents and a motherly old governess. In The Wings of the Dove (1902) an inheritance destroys the love of a young couple. James considered The Ambassadors (1903) his most "perfect" work of art. James's most famous short story is The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story in which the question of childhood corruption obsesses a governess. Although James is best known for his novels, his essays are now attracting a more general audience.
Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and novels for the New York edition of his complete works. His autobiography, A Small Boy And Others, appeared in 1913 and was continued in Notes Of A Son And Brother (1914). The third volume, The Middle Years, appeared posthumously in 1917. The outbreak of World War I was a shock for James, and on July 26, 1915 he became a British citizen as a declaration of loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against the America's refusal to enter the war. James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915, and died in London on February 28, 1916. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes are interred at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Early career
James early established the precedent of pursuing his career as a man of letters. His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket," published in 1863, that reflected a life-long interest in the actor's art. From an early age James read, criticized, and learned from the classics of English, American, French, Italian, German and (in translation) Russian literature. In 1863, he anonymously published his first short story, A Tragedy of Error. Until his fiftieth year he supported himself by writing, principally by contributing extensively to illustrated monthly magazines in the United States and Great Britain, but after his sister's death in 1892 his royalties were supplemented by a modest income from the family's properties in Syracuse, New York.Until late in life his novels were serialized in magazines before book publication, and he wrote the monthly installments as they were due, allowing him little opportunity to revise the final work. To supplement his income he also wrote frequently for newspapers, and from 1863 to his death he maintained a strenuous schedule of publication in a variety of genres and media. In his criticism of fiction, the theater, and painting he developed ideas concerning the unity of the arts; he wrote two full-length biographies, two volumes of memoirs of his childhood and a long fragment of autobiography; 22 novels, including two left unfinished at his death, 112 tales of varying lengths, fifteen plays, and dozens of travel and topical essays.
Biographers and critics have identified Henrik Ibsen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, and Ivan Turgenev as important influences. He heavily revised his major novels and many of his stories for a selected edition of his fiction, whose twenty-three volumes formed an artistic autobiography which he called "The New York Edition" to emphasize his continuing ties to the city of his birth. In his essay The Art of Fiction, and in prefaces to each volume of The New York Edition, James explained his views of the art of fiction, emphasizing the importance to him of realist portrayals of character as seen through the eyes and thoughts of an embodied narrator.
At several points in his career James wrote plays, beginning with one-act plays written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871 and a dramatization of his popular novella Daisy Miller in 1882. From 1890 to 1892, he made a concerted effort to succeed commercially on the London stage, writing a half-dozen plays of which only one, a dramatization of his novel The American, was produced. 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. The effort was made avowedly to improve his finances, and after his sister Alice's death in 1892, as he had a modest independent income, he halted his theatrical efforts. In 1893, 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 James wrote a long drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander produced. There was a noisy uproar on the opening night, January 5, 1895, with hissing from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain, and the author was considerably upset. The incident was not repeated, the play received good reviews, and had a modest run of five weeks and was then 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 this effort James insisted that he would write no more for the theater, 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 1907, 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 May 6, 1910 plunged London into mourning and the theaters were closed. Discouraged by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work, James did not renew his efforts in the theater, but recycled his plays as successful novels. The Outcry was a best-seller in the United States when it was published in 1911. During the years 1890-1893 when he was most engaged with the theater, James wrote a good deal of theatrical criticism and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time on the London stage.
Biographer Leon Edel was the first to call attention to the importance of the "theatrical years" 1890–1895 for James's later work. Following the commercial failure of his novel The Tragic Muse, in 1890, James renounced novel writing and dedicated himself to short fiction and plays, which he described as related forms. Between 1890 and 1895, he sketched in his notebooks plots and themes of nearly all his later novels, which he first conceived as short stories or plays. The structure of his late novels was "scenic" in James's special sense, in that they followed the scene-by-scene structure of a French play in the classical mode, and he freely translated short stories into plays and vice versa. The use of an observer's consciousness and the sense of the action as a performance became most marked in James's fiction in and after the 1890s. Failing to make a commercial success on the stage, however, and finding that the stresses of theatrical work were difficult for him to sustain, he returned to the writing of long, serialized novels, which again became the mainstay of his income. With his new private income as well, he was able to maintain a country house and rooms in London.
Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was deeply traumatized 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 James's fiction, which partly freed him from his fears. Other biographers and scholars have not accepted this account, however; the more common view being that of F.O. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes [for the theater]. . . he felt a resurgence of new energy."
James returned to the United States in 1904–1905 for a lecture tour to recoup his finances and to visit his family. His essays describing that visit, published as The American Scene, were perhaps his most important work of social commentary. In them he described the rise of commerce and democracy, the impact of free immigration on American culture, and his agonized sense that his deeply felt American nationality was threatened by these upheavals.
Novels
Although any selection of James's novels as "major" must inevitably depend to some extent on personal preference, the following books have achieved prominence among his works in the views of many critics.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. Roderick Hudson (1875) is a bildungsroman that traces the development of the title character, an extremely talented sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of immaturity—this was James's first serious attempt at a full-length novel — it has attracted favorable comment due to the vivid realization 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 femme 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.
Although Roderick Hudson featured mostly American characters in a European setting, James made the Europe–America contrast even more explicit in his next novel. In fact, the contrast could be considered the leading theme of The American (1877). This book is a combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th century American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of Europe, and learns not to take either for granted.
James did not set all of his novels in Europe or focus exclusively on the contrast between the New World and the Old. Set in New York City, Washington Square (1880) is a deceptively simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. The book is often compared to Jane Austen's work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships. James was not particularly enthusiastic about Jane Austen, so he might not have regarded the comparison as flattering. In fact, James was not enthusiastic about Washington Square itself. He tried to read it over for inclusion in the New York Edition of his fiction (1907–09) but found that he could not. So he excluded the novel from the edition. But other readers have enjoyed the book enough to make it one of the more popular works in the entire Jamesian canon.
With The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains to this day his most popular long fiction, if the Amazon sales rankings are any indication. This impressive achievement is the story 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. Set mostly in Europe, notably England and Italy, and generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, this novel is not just a reflection of James's absorbing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old. The book also treats in a profound way the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal and sexuality.
In the 1880s James began to explore new areas of interest besides the Europe–America contrast and the "American girl". In particular, he began writing on explicitly political themes. The Bostonians (1886) is a bittersweet tragicomedy that centers on an odd triangle of characters: Basil Ransom, an unbending political conservative from Mississippi; Olive Chancellor, Ransom's cousin and a zealous Boston feminist; and Verena Tarrant, a pretty protege of Olive's in the feminist movement. The story line concerns the contest between Ransom and Olive for Verena's allegiance and affection, though the novel also includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and quirky eccentrics.
The political theme turned darker in The Princess Casamassima (1886), the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. The book is something of a lone sport in the Jamesian canon for dealing with such a violent political subject. But it is often paired with The Bostonians, which is concerned with political issues in a less tragic manner.
Just as James was beginning his ultimately disastrous attempt to conquer the stage, he wrote The Tragic Muse (1890). This novel offers a wide, cheerful panorama of English life and follows the fortunes of two would-be artists: Nick Dormer, who vacillates between a political career and his efforts to become a painter, and Miriam Rooth, an actress striving for artistic and commercial success. A huge cast of supporting characters help and hinder their pursuits. The book reflects James's consuming interest in the theater and is often considered to mark the close of the second or middle phase of his career in the novel.
After the failure of his "dramatic experiment" James returned to his fiction with a deeper, more incisive approach. He began to probe his characters' consciousness in a more insightful manner, which had been foreshadowed in such passages as Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. His style also started to grow in complexity to reflect the greater depth of his analysis. The Spoils of Poynton (1897), considered the first example of this final phase, is a half-length novel that describes the struggle between Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, and her son Owen over a houseful of precious antique furniture. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch, a young woman in love with Owen but sympathetic to Mrs Gereth's anguish over losing the antiques she patiently collected.
James continued the more involved, psychological approach to his fiction with What Maisie Knew (1897), the story of the sensitive daughter of divorced and irresponsible parents. The novel has great contemporary relevance as an unflinching account of a wildly dysfunctional family. The book is also a notable technical achievement by James, as it follows the title character from earliest childhood to precocious maturity.
The third period of James's career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just after the turn of the century. Critic F.O. Mathiessen called this "trilogy" James's major phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study. Although it was the second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove (1902) was the first published. This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honorable 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".
The next published of the three novels, The Ambassadors (1903), is a dark comedy that follows the trip of protagonist Louis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son. Strether is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view. In his preface to the New York Edition text of the novel, James placed this book at the top of his achievements, which has occasioned some critical disagreement. The Golden Bowl (1904) is a complex, intense study of marriage and adultery that completes the "major phase" and, essentially, James's career in the novel. The book explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail and powerful insight.
Short stories
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.Just as the contrast between Europe and America was a predominant theme in James's early novels, many of his first tales also explored the clash between the Old World and the New. In "A Passionate Pilgrim" (1871), the earliest fiction that James included in the New York Edition, the difference between America and Europe erupts into open conflict, which leads to a sadly ironic ending. The story's technique still seems somewhat inexpert, with passages of local color description occasionally interrupting the flow of the narrative. But James manages to craft an interesting and believable example of what he would call the "Americano-European legend".
James published many stories before what would prove to be his greatest success with the readers of his time, "Daisy Miller" (1878). This story portrays the confused courtship of the title character, a free-spirited American girl, by Winterbourne, a compatriot of hers with much more sophistication. His pursuit of Daisy is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates they meet in Switzerland and Italy. Her lack of understanding of the social mores of the society she so desperately wishes to enter ultimately leads to tragedy.
As James moved on from studies of the Europe-America clash and the American girl in his novels, his shorter works also explored new subjects in the 1880s. "The Aspern Papers" (1888) is one of James's best-known and most acclaimed longer tales. The storyline is based on an anecdote that James heard about a Lord Byron devotee who tried to obtain some valuable letters written by the poet. Set in a brilliantly described Venice, the story demonstrates James's ability to generate almost unbearable suspense while never neglecting the development of his characters. Another fine example of the middle phase of James's career in short narrative is "The Pupil" (1891), the story of a precocious young boy growing up in a mendacious and dishonorable family. He befriends his tutor, who is the only adult in his life that he can trust. James presents their relationship with sympathy and insight, and the story reaches what some have considered the status of classical tragedy.
The final phase of James's short narratives shows the same characteristics as the final phase of his novels: a more involved style, a deeper psychological approach, and a sharper focus on his central characters. Probably his most popular short narrative among today's readers, "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) is a ghost story that has lent itself well to operatic and film adaptation. With its possibly ambiguous content and powerful narrative technique, the story challenges the reader to determine if the protagonist, an unnamed governess, is correctly reporting events or is instead an unreliable neurotic with an overheated imagination. To further muddy the waters, her written account of the experience—a frame tale—is being read many years later at a Christmas house party by someone who claims to have known her.
"The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) is almost universally considered one of James's finest short narratives, and has often been compared with The Ambassadors in its meditation on experience or the lack of it. The story also treats other universal themes: loneliness, fate, love and death. The parable of John Marcher and his peculiar destiny speaks to anyone who has speculated on the worth and meaning of human life. Among his last efforts in short narrative, "The Jolly Corner" (1908) is usually held to be one of James's best ghost stories. The tale describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty New York house where he grew up. Brydon encounters a "sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."
Themes and style
James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from different worlds—the Old World (Europe), simultaneously artistic, corrupting, and alluring; and the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive—and explore how this clash of personalities and cultures affects the two worlds.He favored internal, psychological drama, and his work is often about conflicts between imaginative protagonists and their difficult environments. As his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work:
When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light... His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.
His earlier work is considered realist because of the carefully described details of his characters' physical surroundings. But throughout his long career James maintained a strong interest in a variety of artistic effects and movements. His work gradually became more metaphorical and symbolic as he entered more deeply into the minds of his characters. In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James's later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th century fiction.
In the late 20th century, many of James's novels were filmed by the team of Ismail Merchant & James Ivory, and this period saw a small resurgence of interest in his works. Among the best known of these are the short works "Daisy Miller", Washington Square and "The Turn of the Screw", and the novels The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors and The American.
The prose of James's later works is frequently marked by long, digressive sentences that defer the verb and include many qualifying adverbs, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. James seemed to change from a fairly straightforward style in his earlier writing to a more elaborate manner in his later works. Biographers have noted that the change of style occurred at approximately the time that James began dictating his fiction to a secretary.
Henry James was afflicted with a mild stutter. He overcame this by cultivating the habit of speaking very slowly and deliberately. Since he believed that good writing should resemble the conversation of an intelligent man, the process of dictating his works may perhaps account for a shift in style from direct to conversational sentences. The resulting prose style is at times baroque. His friend Edith Wharton, who admired him greatly, said that there were some passages in his works which were all but incomprehensible. His short fiction, such as "The Aspern Papers" and "The Turn of the Screw", is often considered to be more readable than the longer novels, and early works tend to be more accessible than later ones.
"The Turn of the Screw", however, is itself one of James's later works. Broad-brush comments about the "accessibility" of James's fiction are suspect, at best. Many of his later short stories—"Europe", "Paste" and "Mrs. Medwin", for instance—are briefer and more straightforward in style than some tales of his earlier years.
For much of his life James was an expatriate, an outsider, living in Europe. Much of The Portrait of a Lady was written while he lived in Venice, a city whose beauty he found distracting; he was better pleased with the small town of Rye in England. This feeling of being an American in Europe came through as a recurring theme in his books, which contrasted American innocence (or a lack of sophistication) with European sophistication (or decadence)
He made only a modest living from his books, yet was often the houseguest of the wealthy. James had grown up in a well-to-do family, and he was able to enter into this world for many of the impressions and observations he would eventually include in his fiction. (He said he got some of his best story ideas from dinner table gossip.) He was a man whose sexuality was uncertain and whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine. William Faulkner once referred to James as "the nicest old lady I ever met." In a similar vein Thomas Hardy called James and Robert Louis Stevenson "virtuous females" when he read their unfavorable comments about Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Percy Lubbock's 1920 collection of James's letters. Teddy Roosevelt also criticized James for his supposed lack of masculinity. Oddly, when James toured America in 1904-05, he met Roosevelt—who James dubbed "Theodore Rex" and called "a dangerous and ominous jingo"—at a White House dinner. The two men chatted amiably and at length, as if they were the best of friends.
It is often asserted that James's being a permanent outsider in so many ways may have helped him in his detailed psychological analysis of situations—one of the strongest features of his writing. He was never a full member of any camp. (See The Princess Casamassima, especially the Princess's comment that Hyacinth is doomed to looking at the world through a sheet of glass.) In his review of Van Wyck Brooks's The Pilgrimage of Henry James, critic Edmund Wilson noted James's detached, objective viewpoint and made a startling comparison:
One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. 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.
It is possible to see many of James's stories as psychological thought-experiments. The Portrait of a Lady may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich; alternatively, it has been suggested that the storyline was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection. The novella The Turn of the Screw describes the psychological history of an unmarried (and, according to some critics, sexually repressed and possibly unbalanced) young governess. The unnamed governess stumbles into a terrifying, ambiguous situation involving her perceptions of the ghosts of a now-dead couple: her predecessor Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel's lover, Peter Quint.
Nonfiction
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 (1884), he argued against rigid proscriptions 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 valuable critical articles on other novelists; typical is his insightful book-length study of his American predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne. When he assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years, James wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to the same searching, occasionally harsh criticism.For most of his life James harbored ambitions for success as a playwright. He converted his novel The American into a play that enjoyed modest returns in the early 1890s. 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 1895. 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 dramatize his characters' thoughts and emotions. James produced a small but valuable amount of theatrical criticism, including perceptive appreciations of Henrik Ibsen.
With his wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on the visual arts. Perhaps his most valuable contribution was his favorable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent, a painter whose critical status has improved markedly in recent decades. James also wrote sometimes charming, sometimes brooding articles about various places he visited and lived in. His most famous books of travel writing include Italian Hours (an example of the charming approach) and The American Scene (most definitely on the brooding side).
James was one of the great letter-writers of any era. More than ten thousand of his personal letters are extant, and over three thousand have been published in a large number of collections. A complete edition of the letters is scheduled for publication beginning in 2006. James's correspondents included celebrated contemporaries like Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad, along with many others in his wide circle of friends. The letters range from the "mere twaddle of graciousness" to serious discussions of artistic, social and personal issues. Very late in life James began a series of autobiographical works: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the unfinished The Middle Years. 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.
Personal life
James never married, and after settling in London proclaimed himself "a bachelor" and regularly rejected suggestions that he marry. After his death, critics speculated on the cause of his bachelorhood. F. W. Dupee, in several well-regarded volumes on the James family, originated the theory that James had been in love with his cousin Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism . . . was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir A Small Boy and Others, recounting a dream of a Napoleonic images in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled. This analysis seemed to support literary critics like Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington who had condemned James's expatriation, and who criticized his work as effeminate and deracinated. Leon Edel used it as the premise of his own masterly biography, which held the field for many years. Dupee had not been given access to the James family papers, however, and had worked principally from James's published memoir of his older brother, and the limited collection of letters edited by Percy Lubbock, which was heavily weighted toward James's last years. Dupee's account, perhaps as a result, portrayed James as a man moving directly from childhood, when he trailed after his older brother, to an elderly invalidism.As more material became available to scholars, including the diaries of contemporaries and hundreds of affectionate and sometimes erotic letters written by James to younger men, the picture of neurotic celibacy gave way to a portrait of a closeted homosexual. As author Terry Eagleton has stated, "...gay critics debate exactly how repressed his (possible) homosexuality was..." James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of May 6, 1904 to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry". How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers, but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasi-erotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment." To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile I can only try to live without you," and it is only in letters to young gay men that James refers to himself as their "lover". James wrote to young men who are now thought to have been homosexual or bisexual, who made up a large fraction of his close male friends. In a letter to Howard Sturgis, following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two". In letters to Hugh Walpole, James pursues involved jokes and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who "paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well meaning old trunk". The privately printed letters to Walter Berry have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism.
However, James wrote to fellow-novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others." In another example he wrote to his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Jones:
Dearest Mary Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me 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 a wrong impression, or a "colourable pretext"...However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life...
His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Leon Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon. Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness. Gordon builds on Edel's account and adds her own speculation that James felt guilt at having sabotaged Woolson's work. Woolson's biographers have strongly objected to Edel's account, however, and have generally portrayed James as a friend who advanced Woolson's career. Novick in his more recent account argues that the available evidence shows that James suffered strong emotions prompted by the apparent suicide of a friend and colleague, but that there is no evidence Woolson was in love with him or that he was the cause of her death.
Legacy
Perhaps the most prominent examples of James's legacy in recent years have been the film versions of several of his novels and stories. The Merchant-Ivory movies were mentioned earlier, but a number of other filmmakers have based productions on James's fiction. The Iain Softley-directed version of The Wings of the Dove (1997) was successful with both critics and audiences. Helena Bonham Carter received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her memorable portrayal of Kate Croy. Jane Campion tried her hand with The Portrait of a Lady (1996) but with much less success. In earlier times Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) brought "The Turn of the Screw"' to vivid life on film, and William Wyler's The Heiress (1949) did the same for Washington Square.James has also influenced his fellow novelists. In fact, there has been a recent spate of "James books", as mentioned above. Such disparate writers as Joyce Carol Oates with Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly (1994), Louis Auchincloss with The Ambassadress (1950), and Tom Stoppard with The Real Thing (1982) were explicitly influenced by James's works. James was definitely out of his element when it came to music, but Benjamin Britten's operatic version of "The Turn of the Screw" (1954) has become one of the composer's most popular works. William Tuckett converted the story into a ballet in 1999.
Even when the influence is not so obvious, James can cast a powerful spell. In 1954, when the shades of depression were thickening fast, Ernest Hemingway wrote an emotional letter where he tried to steady himself as he thought James would: "Pretty soon I will have to throw this away so I better try to be calm like Henry James. Did you ever read Henry James? He was a great writer who came to Venice and looked out the window and smoked his cigar and thought." The odd, perhaps subconscious or accidental allusion to "The Aspern Papers" is striking. And there are the real oddities, like the Rolls-Royce ad which used Strether's famous words: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to." That's more than a little ironic, considering The Ambassadors' sardonic treatment of the "great new force" of advertising.
Henry James books in order
Watch and Ward (1871)Roderick Hudson (1875)
The American (1877)
The Europeans (1878)
Confidence (1879)
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
The Reverberator (1888)
The Tragic Muse (1890)
The Other House (1896)
The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Sacred Fount (1901)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Whole Family (1908)
The Outcry (1911)
The Ivory Tower (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
The Sense of the Past (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
Short stories and novellas
A Tragedy of Error (1864)The Story of a Year (1865)
A Landscape Painter (1866)
A Day of Days (1866)
My Friend Bingham (1867)
Poor Richard (1867)
The Story of a Masterpiece (1868)
A Most Extraordinary Case (1868)
A Problem (1868)
De Grey: A Romance (1868)
Osborne's Revenge (1868)
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
A Light Man (1869)
Gabrielle de Bergerac (1869)
Travelling Companions (1870)
A Passionate Pilgrim (1871)
At Isella (1871)
Master Eustace (1871)
Guest's Confession (1872)
The Madonna of the Future (1873)
The Sweetheart of M. Briseux (1873)
The Last of the Valerii (1874)
Madame de Mauves (1874)
Adina (1874)
Professor Fargo (1874)
Eugene Pickering (1874)
Benvolio (1875)
Crawford's Consistency (1876)
The Ghostly Rental (1876)
Four Meetings (1877)
Rose-Agathe (1878, as Théodolinde)
Daisy Miller (1878)
Longstaff's Marriage (1878)
An International Episode (1878)
The Pension Beaurepas (1879)
A Diary of a Man of Fifty (1879)
A Bundle of Letters (1879)
The Point of View (1882)
The Siege of London (1883)
Impressions of a Cousin (1883)
Lady Barbarina (1884)
Pandora (1884)
The Author of Beltraffio (1884)
Georgina's Reasons (1884)
A New England Winter (1884)
The Path of Duty (1884)
Mrs. Temperly (1887)
Louisa Pallant(1888)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
The Liar (1888)
A Modern Warning (1888)
A London Life (1888)
The Patagonia (1888)
The Lesson of the Master (1888)
The Solution (1888)
The Pupil (1891)
Brooksmith (1891)
The Marriages (1891)
The Chaperon (1891)
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
Nona Vincent (1892)
The Real Thing (1892)
The Private Life (1892)
Lord Beaupré (1892)
The Visits (1892)
Sir Dominick Ferrand (1892)
Greville Fane (1892)
Collaboration (1892)
Owen Wingrave (1892)
The Wheel of Time (1892)
The Middle Years (1893)
The Death of the Lion (1894)
The Coxon Fund (1894)
The Next Time (1895)
Glasses (1896)
The Altar of the Dead (1895)
The Figure in the Carpet (1896)
The Way It Came (1896)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Covering End (1898)
In the Cage (1898)
John Delavoy (1898)
The Given Case (1898)
Europe (1899)
The Great Condition (1899)
The Real Right Thing (1899)
Paste (1899)
The Great Good Place (1900)
Maud-Evelyn (1900)
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (1900)
The Tree of Knowledge (1900)
The Abasement of the Northmores (1900)
The Third Person (1900)
The Special Type (1900)
The Tone of Time (1900)
Broken Wings (1900)
The Two Faces (1900)
Mrs. Medwin (1901)
The Beldonald Holbein (1901)
The Story in It (1902)
Flickerbridge (1902)
The Birthplace (1903)
The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
The Papers (1903)
Fordham Castle (1904)
Julia Bride (1908)
The Jolly Corner (1908)
The Velvet Glove (1909)
Mora Montravers (1909)
Crapy Cornelia (1909)
The Bench of Desolation (1909)
A Round of Visits (1910)
Autobiographies
A Small Boy and Others (1913)Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)
The Middle Years (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
Plays
Theatricals (1894)Theatricals: Second Series (1895)
Guy Domville (1895)
Biographies
Hawthorne (1879)William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)
Other works
Captaine John Smith (1867)A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875)
Transatlantic Sketches (1875)
French Poets and Novelists (1878)
Portraits of Places (1883)[52]
A Little Tour in France (1884)
Partial Portraits (1888)
Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893)
Picture and Text (1893)
Terminations (1893)
The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893)
The Soft Side (1900)
The Better Sort (1903)
English Hours (1905)
The American Scene (1907)
Views and Reviews (1908)
New York Edition (1907–1909)
Italian Hours (1909)
A Small Boy and Others (1913)
Notes on Novelists (1914)
Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)
Within the Rim (1918)
Travelling Companions (1919)
Notebooks (various, published posthumously)
The Middle Years (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
A Most Unholy Trade (1925, published posthumously)
The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (1934)
A Small Boy and Others (1913)
Notes on Novelists (1914)
Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)
Within the Rim (1918)
Travelling Companions (1919)
Notebooks (various, published posthumously)
The Middle Years (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
A Most Unholy Trade (1925, published posthumously)
The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (1934)
Source and additional information: Henry James