American-born writer, gifted with talents in literature, psychology, and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of literary criticism. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne. James once said that he learned more of the craft of writing from Balzac "than from anyone else".

 

"A novel is in its broadest sense a personal, a 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 New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr., was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne. 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 traveled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn At the age of nineteen he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but was more interested in literature than studying law. James published his first short story, ‘A Tragedy of Errors‘ two years later, and then devoted himself to literature. In 1866-69 and 1871-72 he was 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), appeared first serially in the Atlantic. James wrote it while he was traveling through Venice and Paris. Watch and Ward tells a story of a bachelor who adopts a twelve-year-old girl and plans to marry her.

 

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. "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) 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 so-called New York Edition of his complete works. It was published by Charles Scribner‘s Sons. His autobiography, A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS (1913) 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. Two novels, The Ivory Tower and THE SENSE OF THE PAST (1917), were left unfinished at his death.

 

Characteristic for James novels are understanding and sensitively drawn lady portraits. 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 is fooled during her travels in Europe. James started to write the novel in Florence in 1879. He continued to work with it in Venice. "I had rooms on Riva Sciavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn‘t come into sight."

 

The definitive version of the novel appeared in 1908. The protagonist is Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan. She goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle, and their tubercular son, Ralph. Isabel inherits money and goes to Continent with Mrs Touchett and Madame Merle. She turns down proposals of marriage from Casper Goodwood, and marries Gilbert Osmond, a middle-aged snobbish widower with a young daughter, Pansy. "He had a light, lean, rather languid-looking figure, and was apparently neither tall nor short. He was dressed as a man who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar thing." Isabel discovers that Pansy is Madame Merle‘s daughter, it was Madame Merle‘s plot to marry Isabel to Osmond so that he, and Pansy can enjoy Isabel‘s wealth. Caspar Goodwood makes a last attempt to gain her, but she returns to Osmond and Pansy.

 

THE BOSTONIANS (1886), set in the era of the rising feminist movement, was based on Alphonse Daudet‘s novel L‘Évangéliste. 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. "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)

 

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, and 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 pretense 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."

 

James‘s most famous tales include ‘The Turn of the Screw‘, which was first published serially in Collier‘s Weekly, and then with another story in THE TWO MAGICS (1898). 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, two both innocent and corrupted children, 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 inspired later a debate over the question of the ‘reality‘ of the ghosts, were her visions only hallucinations. Although James had rejected in the beginning of his career "spirit-rappings and ghost-raising", in the 1880s he become interested in the unconscious and the supernatural. In 1908 he wrote that "Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not "ghosts" at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for whichcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon." Virginia Woolf thought that Henry James‘s ghost have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts - "the blood-stained captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons." Edmund Wilson was convinced that the story was "primarily intended as a characterization of the governess".

 

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); Classic Horror Writers, ed. by Harold Bloom (1994); A Private Life of Henry James by Lyndall Gordon (1999); Henry James and Modern Moral Life by Robert B. Pippin (2001) - 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 for her great-uncle James. Woolson died perhaps by her own volition: she fell to her death in Venice from a bedroom window. - WiILLIAM 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. Selected works: 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

Selected works:

 

PYRAMUS AND THISBE, 1869 (play)

STILL WATERS, 1871 (play)

A CHANGE OF HEART, 1872 (play)

A PASSIONATE PILGRIM AND OTHER TALES, 1875

RODERICK HUDSON, 1875

TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES, 1875

THE AMERICAN, 1877

FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS, 1878

WATCH AND WARD, 1878 (published first in serial form in 1871)

THE EUROPEANS, 1878 - Eurooppalaiset - film 1979, dir. by James Ivory, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, starring Lee Remick, Robin Ellis, Tim Woodward

DAISY MILLER, 1879 - film 1974, dir. by Peter Bogdanovich, starring Cybil Shepherd, Barry Brown, Cloris Leachman

CONFIDENCE, 1879

AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE, 1879

THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE, 1879

HAWTHORNE, 1880

THE DIARY OF MAN OF FIFTY, 1880

WASHINGTON SQUARE, 1880 - Washingtonin aukio (suom. Kersti Juva) - film The Heiress in 1949, dir. by William Wyler; film 1997, dir. by Agnieszka Holland, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, Ben Chaplin - Romaani WASHINGTON SQUARE (1880) on esitetty suomeksi näytelmänä Perijätär.

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, 1881 - Naisen muotokuva - film 1996, dir. by Jane Campion, starring Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich

THE SIEGE OF LONDON, 1883

PORTRAITS OF PLACES, 1883

DAISY MILLER, 1883 (play)

A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE, 1884

TALES OF THREE CITIES, 1884

THE ART OF FICTION, 1885 (with W. Besant)

THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO, 1885

STORIES REVIVED, 1885

THE BOSTONIANS, 1886 - Bostonin naiset - film 1984, dir. by James Ivory, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, starring Christopher Reeve, Vanessa Redgrave, Madeleine Potter

THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA, 1886

THE REVERBERATOR, 1888

PARTIAL PORTRAITS, 1888

THE ASPEN PAPERS, 1888 - Aspernin paperit - films: 1946 dir. by Martin Gabel; 198-, dir. by Eduardo de Gregorio

A LONDON LIFE, 1889

THE TRAGIC MUSE, 1890

THE WHEEL OF TIME, 1892

THE LESSON OF THE MASTER, 1892

THE PRIVATE LIFE, 1893

ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE, 1893

THE REAL THING, 1893

THE ALBUM, 1894 (play)

DISENGAGED, 1894 (play)

THE REPROBATE, 1894 (play)

TENANTS, 1894 (play)

TERMINATIONS, 1895

EMBARRASSMENTS, 1896

THE OTHER HOUSE, 1896

THE SPOILS OF POYNTON, 1897

WHAT MAISIE KNEW, 1897 - Mitä Maisie tiesi - film 1975, dir. by Babette Mangolte

IN THE CAGE, 1898

TWO MAGICS, 1898 - Includes ‘The Turn of the Screw‘ - films: The Innocents in 1961, dir.by Jack Clayton, written by William Archibald and Truman Capote, starring Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins ; another adaptation in 1971, loosely based on James‘s story, dir. by Michael Winner ; British/French adaptation from 1992, dir. by Rusty Lemorande, starring Patsy Kensit, Stephane Audran, Julia Sands - esitety kuunnelmana Ruuvi kiristyy

THE AWKWARD AGE, 1899

THE SOFT SIDE, 1900

THE SACRED FOUNT, 1901

THE WINGS OF DOVE, 1902 - film 1997, dir. by Iain Softley, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache, Alison Elliott; film Under Heaven (1997), dir. by Meg Richman, starring Molly Parker, Aden Young, Joely Richardson - suomeksi esitetty näytelmänä Kyyhkysen siivet

THE AMBASSADORS, 1903

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY AND HIS FRIENDS, 1903

THE BETTER SORT, 1903

THE GOLDEN BOWL, 1904 - film 2000, dir. by James Ivory, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, starring Nick Nolte and Uma Thurman - "Much of the dialogue in Ms. Jhabvala‘s carefully wrought screenplay voices feelings that remain unspoken in the novel, and this is the movie‘s biggest problem. No matter how well the characters‘ thoughts have been translated into speech, the act of compressing their rich, complex inner lives into dialogue without resorting to voice-over narration inevitably tends to cheapen them and turn a drama about the revelation of hidden truths into the terser, more commonplace language of an intelligent soap opera." (Stephen Holden in The New York Times, April 27, 2001)

ENGLISH HOURS, 1905

THE QUESTION OF OUR SPEECH, 1905

THE AMERICAN SCENE, 1907

VIEW AND REVIEWS, 1908

JULIA BRIDE, 1909

NOVELS AND TALES (New York Edition), 1907-09 (24 vols.)

ITALIAN HOURS, 1909

THE FINER GRAIN, 1909

THE FINER GRAIN, 1910

THE OUTCRY, 1911

HENRY JAMES YEARBOOK, 1911 (ed. by Evelyn Garnaut Smalley)

A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS, 1913

NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER, 1914

NOTES ON NOVELISTS, 1914

THE QUESTION OF MIND, 1915

LETTERS TO AN EDITOR, 1916

LETTERS FROM AMERICA, 1916 (Rupert Brooke‘s letters collected by Henry James)

THE IVORY TOWER, 1917

THE SENSE OF PAST, 1917

THE MIDDLE YEARS, 1917

GABRIELLE DE BERGERAC, 1918

TRAVELLING COMPANION, 1919

WITHIN THE RIM, 1919

LETTERS, 1920 (ed. by Percy Lubbock)

MASTER EUSTACE, 1920

NOTES AND REVIEWS, 1921

A LETTER TO MRS. LINTON, 1921

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN FOR RUTH DRAPER, 1922 (play)

NOVELS AND STORIES, 1921-23 (35 vols., ed. by Percy Lubbock)

THREE LETTERS TO JOSEPH CONRAD, 1926

LETTERS TO WALTER BERRY, 1928

LETTERS TO A.C. BENSON AND AUGUSTE MONOD, 1930

THEATRE AND FRIENDSHIP, 1932 (ed. by Elizabeth Robins)

THE ART OF THE NOVEL: CRITICAL PREFACES, 1934 (ed. by R.P. Blackmur)

AMERICAN NOVELS AND STORIES, 1947 (ed. by F.O. Matthiessen)

THE NOTEBOOKS OF HENRY JAMES, 1947

HENRY JAMES AND ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1948 (ed. by Janet Smith)

THE AMERICAN, 1949 (play)

THE HIGH BID, 1949 (play)

GUY DOMVILLE, 1949 (play)

THE OTHER HOUSE, 1949 (play)

THE OUTCRY, 1949 (play)

ROUGH STATEMENT FOR THREE ACTS FOUNDED ON THE CHAPERON, 1949 (play)

THE SALOON, 1949 (play)

SUMMERSOFT, 1949 (play)

THE GHOSTLY TALES OF HENRY JAMES, 1949

EIGHT UNCOLLECTED TALES, 1950

AMERICAN ESSAYS, 1956 (ed. by Leon Edel)

THE PAINTER‘S EYE, 1956 (ed. by John L. Sweeney)

THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL, 1956

PARISIAN SKETCHES, 1957

LITERARY REVIEWS AND ESSAYS ON AMERICAN, ENGLISH, AND FRENCH LITERATURE, 1957

THE HOUSE OF FICTION, 1957 (ed. by Leon Edel)

THE ART OF TRAVEL, 1958

FRENCH WRITERS AND AMERICAN WOMEN, 1960 (ed. by Peter Buitenhuis)

THE COMPLETE TALES OF HENRY JAMES, 1962-64 (12 vols.)

SELECTED LITERARY CRITICISM, 1963 (ed. by Morris Shapira)

THEORY OF FICTION, 1972 (ed. by James E. Miller, Jr.)

LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES, 1974-84 (4 vols.)

HENRY JAMES: LITERARY CRITICISM, vol. 2, 1985 (ed. by Leon Edel)

THE ART OF CRITICISM, 1986

THE CRITICAL MUSE, 1987

COLLECTED TRAVEL WRITING, 1993 (ed. by Richard Howard)

TRAVELING IN ITALY WITH HENRY JAMES, 1994

HENRY JAMES: COMPLETE STORIES 1898-1910, 1996 (ed. by Denis Donoghue)

HENRY JAMES: COMPLETE STORIES 1874-1884, 1999 (ed. by Edward W. Said, William Vance)

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