James, Henry (1843–1916), novelist, writer of short stories, plays, critical essays, and travel accounts; prose stylist and theorist of fiction.Born in
New York City the son of Henry James Sr. and Mary Robertson Walsh, and the brother of William James,
Henry James was educated abroad in Geneva, Paris, and Bonn and attended Harvard University briefly to study law but read Balzac instead. After a series of transatlantic residences, James in 1876 lived for a time in Paris where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, and Zola. Later in the year, he settled permanently in England: first in London and, in 1898, in Rye. He knew the principal literary men and women of the day, including Robert Browning and George Eliot, whose poetry and fiction he admired and emulated.
James found the American scene bereft of the cultural institutions that gave breadth and depth to a novelist's imagination: “no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces. no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!” Consequently, he made the subject of his fiction the complex fate of being an American testing the value of Europe. He brought the genre of the international novel to perfection in plots that examined American naiveté amidst European sophistication, New World morality in the arena of Old World manners.
The American (1877),
Daisy Miller (1879), and, especially,
The Portrait of a Lady (1881) won for James artistic acclaim and fame as a psychological realist. His later international novels
The Wings of the Dove (1902),
The Ambassadors (1903), and
The Golden Bowl (1904), written in his more demanding later style, achieved subtlety and sophistication, though little recognition in his own time. Later generations, raised on Joyce and Proust, praised them as James's “major phase.” James also wrote novels and tales with exclusively American settings (like
Washington Square, 1881;
The Bostonians, 1886) and exclusively English settings (like
The Spoils of Poynton, 1897;
The Awkward Age, 1899), equally incisive psychologically and socially with his international fiction. He tried but failed to become a successful London playwright in the early 1890s.
James, who often wrote about artists and writers, said of himself in 1878 that he had an “imagination of disaster” and saw life as a battle in which “evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy.” In this situation, life “bids us learn to will and seek to understand.” A Jamesian novel presents this sense of life by constantly nourishing a character's consciousness and having him or her make choices based on an ever more informed sensibility. The novel
What Maisie Knew (1897) is paradigmatic of this form, ending with a girl on the verge of adolescence who has learned enough as a child to acquire a moral sense and choose the way she will live.
In 1915, when the United States delayed entering
World War I to help England in its fight against Germany, James became a British subject; he was awarded the Order of Merit shortly before his death in 1916.
See also
Literature: Civil War to World War I.
Bibliography
Leon Edel , Henry James, 5 vols., 1953–72.
The Henry James Review, (1979– ), published three times a year.
Joseph Wiesenfarth
