Henry James

Henry James (1843–1916) was born on 15 April 1843 in New York City, into one of the most remarkable American families of the nineteenth century. His father, Henry James Sr., was a wealthy, eccentric Swedenborgian theologian; his brother William became America’s most important philosopher and psychologist. The James children were educated by a succession of tutors and schools in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, and Bonn — an itinerant, cosmopolitan upbringing that gave Henry his lifelong subject: the encounter between American innocence and European experience.

Life and Career

James settled permanently in Europe in 1875, living first in Paris (where he knew Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, and the circle of the Goncourt brothers) and then in London, where he became the most socially connected American writer of his generation. He produced fiction at a prodigious rate: twenty novels, over a hundred short stories and novellas, and a vast body of criticism, travel writing, autobiography, and letters across a career spanning fifty years.

His career is conventionally divided into three phases. The early novels — Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880) — established the “international theme”: Americans abroad, confronting the complexities of European civilisation. The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the story of Isabel Archer’s fateful choice of a husband, is the masterpiece of the early period and one of the great novels of the nineteenth century.

The middle period produced social novels set in London and Paris (The Bostonians, 1886; The Princess Casamassima, 1886; The Tragic Muse, 1890) and the famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), whose ambiguity — is the governess seeing real ghosts or projecting her own sexual repression? — has generated more critical debate than perhaps any other short work in English.

The late phase — the “Major Phase” — produced the three great novels that are James’s supreme achievement: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). These novels are written in the famous “late style” — sentences of extraordinary length and complexity, a syntax that enacts the very process of consciousness as it grasps, qualifies, and revises its perceptions. They are the most sophisticated novels in the English language.

James lived at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, from 1898 until his death. He became a British citizen in 1915, partly as a protest against American neutrality in the First World War. He received the Order of Merit on his deathbed. He died on 28 February 1916.

Major Works and Themes

James’s central subject is consciousness itself — the way the mind perceives, evaluates, and is deceived. His novels are dramas of moral awareness in which the action is internal: characters discover truths about themselves and others through subtle shifts of perception rather than through external events.

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) established the Jamesian heroine: Isabel Archer, a young American woman of intelligence and spirit, comes to Europe, inherits a fortune, and makes the worst possible choice of husband — Gilbert Osmond, a cultivated aesthete who is also a moral vacuum. The novel’s power lies in James’s extraordinary rendering of Isabel’s gradual awakening to what she has done.

The Ambassadors (1903), which James himself considered his best novel, tells the story of Lambert Strether, a middle-aged American sent to Paris to rescue a young man from the clutches of a supposedly disreputable woman. What Strether discovers is that the young man’s life in Paris is richer, more beautiful, and more morally complex than anything Strether has known in Woollett, Massachusetts. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to” — Strether’s famous injunction — is James’s most moving statement.

Critical Reception and Legacy

James’s reputation has fluctuated dramatically. He was admired by a select audience during his lifetime but was never popular. The early modernists — Pound, Eliot, Ford — championed him; F.R. Leavis placed him in “the great tradition.” His reputation reached its zenith in the mid-twentieth century, when the New Critics found in his work the perfect object for close reading. He remains one of the foundational figures of the Anglo-American novel and the most important theorist of fiction after Aristotle.

Key Works

• Roderick Hudson (1875)
• The American (1877)
• Daisy Miller (1878)
• Washington Square (1880)
• The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
• The Bostonians (1886)
• The Turn of the Screw (1898)
• The Wings of the Dove (1902)
• The Ambassadors (1903)
• The Golden Bowl (1904)

Collecting James

Henry James is a major collecting name with a vast bibliography spanning half a century of publication on both sides of the Atlantic. Because many of his novels appeared in both American and English editions (sometimes simultaneously, sometimes with one preceding the other), determining the true first edition requires careful bibliographic work.

The New York Edition (1907–1909, Scribner’s, 24 volumes) is the great James collectible: a revised and prefaced edition of his selected fiction that James considered his definitive text. The original edition, in dark blue cloth with photographic frontispieces by Alvin Langdon Coburn, was published in a run of approximately 1,500 sets. Complete sets in fine condition bring $10,000–$30,000.

The Portrait of a Lady (1881, Macmillan, London, three volumes) is the most important James first edition. Three-volume firsts in the original cloth bring $5,000–$15,000.

The Turn of the Screw first appeared in The Two Magics (1898, Macmillan, London). First editions bring $1,000–$3,000.

Daisy Miller (1879, Harper, New York) in the original wrappers is the most accessible and popular early James collectible at $500–$2,000.

The late masterpieces — Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904) — are all collectible in their first editions at $500–$3,000 each.

James autograph material is available — he was a prolific correspondent — and his letters are of extraordinary literary value. The ongoing scholarly edition of his complete letters (published by the University of Nebraska Press) has enhanced interest. Letters at auction bring $500–$5,000 depending on content and recipient.