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Life

James was born 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 Error, 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.^[1] 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.

Career in letters

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,^[2] 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.^[3] 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^[4] and a dramatization of his popular novella Daisy Miller in 1882.^[5] 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.^[6]

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 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."^[7]

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.

Psychological characterizations

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 image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled.^[8] 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 (probable) homosexuality was..."^[9] 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".^[10] How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers,^[11] 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."^[12] 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,"^[13] 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".^[14] 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".^[15] The privately printed letters to Walter Berry have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism.^[16]

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."^[17] 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...^[18]

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,,^[19] 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.^[20]