Henry James Biography and List of Works

American-born writer, gifted with talent in literature, psychology and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of literary criticisms. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne.

"A novel is in its broadest sense a personal, and direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression."
(from The Art of Fiction, 1885)

Henry James was born in Washington Square in New York City, but he grew up in Manhattan. His father, Henry James Sr, was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne. His Irish grandfather had provided the wealth that endowed his heirs with the privileges of comfort and social affluence. James made little money from his novels. Once his friend, the writer Edith Wharton, secretly arranged him a royal advance of $8,000 for THE IVORY TOWER (1917), but the money actually came from Wharton's royalty account with the publisher. When Wharton sent him a letter bemoaning her unhappy marriage, James replied: "Keep making the movements of life."

In his youth James travelled 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 (1971), was written while he was travelling through Venice and Paris. It tells a story of a bachelor who adopts a twelve-year-old girl and then plans to marry her.

"It is a real stroke of luck for a particular country that the capital of the human race happens to be British. Surely every other people would have it theirs if they could. Whether the English deserve to hold it any longer might be an interesting field of inquiry; but as they have not yet let it slip the writer of these lines professes without scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste. For after all if the sense of life is greatest there, it is a sense of the life of people of our incomparable English speech."
(from London, 1888)

After living in Paris, where James was contributor to the New York Tribune, he moved to England, 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 year, and wrote 'Jolly Corner'. It was based on his observations of New York, but also a nightmare of a man, who is haunted by a doppelgänger.

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 in 1915 he became a British citizen as a loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against the US's refusal to enter the war. James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915. He expected to die and exclaimed: "So this is it at last, the distinguished thing!" James died three months later in Rye on February 28, 1916.

"The beauty that suffuses The Ambassadors is the reward due to a fine artist for hard work. James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the narrow path of aesthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself, with modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain. But at what sacrifice!"
(from Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, 1927)

Characteristic of James's novels are understanding and sensitively drawn portraits of women His main themes were the innocence of the New World in conflict with corruption and wisdom of the Old. Among his masterpieces is DAISY MILLER (1879), where the young and innocent American Daisy finds her values in conflict with European sophistication. In THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881) again a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe. THE BOSTONIANS (1886) was based on Alphonse Daudet's novel L'Évangéliste and set in the era of the rising feminist movement. WHAT MAISIE KNEW (1897) depicted a preadolescent young girl, who must chose between her parents and a motherly old governess. In THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (1902) a heritage destroys the love of a young couple. James considered THE AMBASSADORS (1903) his most 'perfect' work of art. The novel depicts Lambert Strether's attempts to persuade Mrs Newsome' son Chad to return from Paris back to the United States. Strether's possibility to marry Mrs Newsome is dropped and he remains content in his role as a widower and observer. James's short stories include '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 audience outside scholarly connoisseurs. In his early critics James considered British and American novels dull and formless and French fiction 'intolerably unclean'. "M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value." (from The Art of Fiction) In PARTIAL PORTRAITS (1888) James paid tribute to his elders, and Emerson, George Eliot, Turgenev. His advice to aspiring writers avoided all theorizing: 'Oh, do something from your point of view'. H.G. Wells used James as the model for George Boon in his Boon (1915). When the protagonist argued that novels should be used for propaganda, not art, James wrote to Wells: "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, Henry James."

See also: H.G. Wells. - Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg's ideas run heavily in Henry James' family. His father was a Swedenborgian and William James, the son of Henry James, showed in his philosophical works a deep understanding of Swedenborg. - Note: In her study A Private Life of Henry James (1999), Lyndall Gordon has focused on two relationships James had with two women. Minny Temple, his cousin, died at the age of 24 of tuberculosis. James used her as the model for such characters as Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer. The relationship with Constance 'Fenimore' Woolson lasted 14 years - she was nicknamed Fenimore after her great-uncle James. Woolson died perhaps by her own volition: she fell to her death in Venice from a bedroom window.

The Turn of the Screw (1898) - first published serially in Collier's Weekly. The short story is written mostly in the form of a journal, kept by a governess, who works on a lonely estate in England. She tries to save her two young charges, Flora and Miles, from the demonic influence of the apparitions of two former servants in the household, steward Peter Quint and the previous governess Miss Jessel. Her employer, the children's uncle, has given strict orders not to bother him with any of the details of their education. The children evade the questions about the ghosts but she certain is that the children see them. When she tries to exorcize their influence, Miles dies in her arms. The story later inspired a debate over the question of the 'reality' of the ghosts, were her visions only hallucinations, and James's intentions.

William James (1842-1910) American philosopher and psychologist. William James earned a medical degree from Harvard University in 1869 and helped in 1884 found the American Society for Psychical Research. James is best known for his formulation of the philosophy of pragmatism, according to which truth is relative and best measured by the extent to which it serves human freedom. : Principles of Psychology, 1890; The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897; Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902; Pragmatism, 1907; Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912 - SEE ALSO: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung

For further reading: The Method of Henry James by J.W. Beach (1918); The Art of Fiction by Percy Lubbock (1921); The Pilgrimage of Henry James by V.W. Brooks (1925); The James Family, ed. by F.O. Matthiessen (1947); The Triple Thinkers by Edmund Wilson (1948); The Great Tradition by by F.R. Leavis (1948); Henry James by F.W. Dupee (1951); The Image of Europe in Henry James by C. Wegelin (1958); The Expense of Vision by by L. Holand (1964); Henry James by Leon Edel (1953-72, 5 vols.); Theory of Fiction by James E. Miller (1972); James the Critic by Vivien Jones (1984); The Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes by Robert Hendrickson (1990); A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. by Daniel Mark Fogel (1993); A Private Life of Henry James by Lyndall Gordon (1999)

PYRAMUS AND THISBE, (1869)