Henry James was one of the major novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th century literary realism.
Background
James, Henry was born in New York City, United States on April 15, 1843, the second son of Henry James, a noted Swedenborgian theologian and social theorist, and the younger brother of William James, the psychologist and philosopher. His mother, Mary Walsh, came from a wealthy family long settled in New York City. His childhood was spent in the city and in Albany and then, between the ages of 12 and 17, in Europe. The family had a substantial income-Henry James, Sr., had inherited his father's estate of $3 million.
Education
Henry was privately tutored in London, Geneva, and Paris. His American education began at school in Newport, R. I. In 1862 he entered Harvard Law School, leaving after a year. He received an honorary degree from Harvard (1911) and another from Oxford (1912).
In 1864 James published his first story and early reviews. His frequent appearances in the Atlantic Monthly began in 1865. Four years later he traveled again in England, France, and Italy, returning to Cambridge in 1870 and publishing his first novel, Watch and Ward. It concerned American life in a specifically American setting, the upper-class world of Boston, its suburbs, and Newport. At the age of 29 James was again in Europe, spending a summer in Paris and most of 1873 in Rome, where he began Roderick Hudson. For a year in New York City he was part of the literary world of the era. His criticism appeared in 1874 and 1875 in the Nation and the North American Review. Also in 1875, Transatlantic Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Roderick Hudson appeared.
James's disengagement from America was a long process. Living in Paris during 1876, James wrote The American. At the time, he knew Ivan Turgenev, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Émile Zola, and others. His expatriation was complete by the end of that year, when he settled in London. The impact of his short novel Daisy Miller (1879) brought James fame in Europe and the United States; it was his first popular success. He repeated the same effect, and intention, in several other novels and stories. In The Portrait of a Lady, for example, the effect is similar but more intricate. James mentioned his "Americano-European legends" as one of the central impulses of his work.
Between 1879 and 1882 James produced his first major series of novels. They were The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence, and The Portrait of a Lady. Of the four, only Washington Square was about American life. By 1886 a 14-volume collection of his novels and tales was published. He wrote The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima in 1886 while living in a flat in De Vere Gardens in London. Both were social dramas. "The Aspern Papers, " the short novel The Reverberator, and "A London Life" appeared the following year. The Tragic Muse, one of his most ambitious novels, was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1890.
James then entered a 5-year period in which he concentrated on writing drama. The American was produced as a play in London by Edward Compton. The effort ended in 1895, when he was jeered at the opening of his play Guy Domville at St. James's Theatre in London. He abandoned the stage. Almost never revived, his plays are included in two volumes, Theatricals and Theatricals: Second Series. In 1898 James settled in Lamb House, Rye, and continued his 20-year "siege" of English life and society. His schedule of concentrated work during the day and of relaxation at night produced in 1898 The Two Magics, a collection of stories that includes his novella "The Turn of the Screw" and the short novel In the Cage. His third and best phase began the following year with The Awkward Age, and between 1899 and 1904 he wrote The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.
In September 1904 James returned to the United States after a 20-year absence, passing the fall with his brother William in New Hampshire and, later, revisiting New York City. After a year of lecturing he returned to Lamb House in England and began revising his fiction and writing the critical prefaces to the definitive New York edition of his work. During 1909 he suffered from a long nervous illness and produced a series of stories that appeared as The Finer Grain. He was in New Hampshire when William died after a long illness. In 1911 he returned to England.
James's autobiographical memoirs, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, were completed shortly before the outbreak of World War I. The war's disruption greatly disturbed him. He began war work in various hospitals, writing for war charities and aiding Belgian refugees. On July 26, 1915 James was naturalized as a British subject. Later in the year his last illness, a stroke and pneumonia, began. He died on February 28, 1916. The funeral services were in Chelsea Old Church, London, and his ashes were buried in the family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The novel, in which James presents his own views on socialism, is considered his best "political" work.
Views
Quotations:
"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
"It's time to start living the life you've imagined."
"I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live."
"Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself."
"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."
"Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance."
"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
"There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither."
"You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part."
"Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain."
"I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will."
"I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet."
"The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience."
Membership
He was a member of Swedenborgian society
Swedenborgian society
Personality
Young Henry was a shy, book-addicted boy who assumed the role of quiet observer beside his active elder brother. In fact, he was cynical, dilettantish, and totally conventional.
Theories concerning his aloofness are many: certain experiences in his youth that might have scarred him psychologically, such as the "obscure" injury to his back; the illness of his sister Alice, who suffered from "hysteria" and recurrent spells of madness; dedication to his art.
Connections
Although he was much in demand by ladies, he never married and does not appear to have had a love affair with any woman.