Henry James: A Life in Letters

by Henry James, Philip Horne (Editor)

This collection of Henry James's letters-more than half of which have never been published-offers a vivid picture of his life of passionate creation and the complex world in which he lived. Through his exchanges with writers such as William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton, as well as presidents, prime ministers, bishops, painters, and great ladies and actresses, we gain a fascinating glimpse of James's views on sex, politics, and friendship as well as his novels and the art of writing. These letters constitute a landmark of James scholarship and the real and best biography of this most complex and compelling artist.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Classics, American, Literary Fiction, 19th Century

704 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1898

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive work of scholarship and biography. Philip Horne does exactly what he sets out to do: provide a life of Henry James through his correspondence. The task required the most meticulous and exhausting scholarship to complete. James' known letter count runs into the tens of thousands, to say nothing of the replies to his letters. Since James and many of his closer correspondents were inveterate and regular burners of intimate letters, the editor of this volume has had to cull his material from archives and private collections all over the place. That is to say, while some of James' voluminous correspondence has appeared in print, there is no standard edition and the scholar of his letters necessarily has to piece the thread together from widely scattered fragments. So the herculean effort of just putting together a sequential array of letters itself is a kind of daunting challenge. That the sequence tells a coherent tale of the life of the writer is still another Everest to have climbed. And finally, to annotate and introduce the nearly 300 letters which make up this volume is still a third problem. Horne has done an amazing job in every respect. The introductory notes to the letters are absolutely essential, particularly when a new correspondent appears for the first time. The footnotes (at the bottom of the page, where they belong, and not slapped into the back of the book where they would be maddeningly inconvenient) are consistently illuminating without being overwhelming. Despite his book's considerable critical apparatus, Horne takes care never to upstage the letters themselves. He has done enough work to make the correspondence enjoyable for even a non-James scholar, but not so much that the pleasures of reading James stretch out in private are occluded. And what letters. James has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of elegant ways of explaining why he hasn't been able to get back to someone in a while--if for no other reason, practitioners of the epistolary art will want to consult this volume to restock their larder of excuses for delay. Another central appeal of the text is that the letters are great windows into the operations and reflections of the more famous members of the James family--several classic letters to William and Alice appear. They are also wonderful exercises in the art of giving and receiving criticism to and from other writers and readers alike. And finally, they are a testament to James' capacity for friendship; regular and intimate exchanges with William Dean Howells and Edmund Gosse (among a half dozen others) bulk large in the book. One naturally starts to read Edel or other biographers for a portrait of James; failing that, one would do well to read this book straight through, for a kind of self-portrait that is entertaining and moving by turns. There is perhaps a little too much caviling about money matters and publication problems (especially with James' longtime agent Pinker), but frankly, James did little else besides travel, read and write. A life without some exposure to the kind of thing that preoccupied James most of the time would be shallow indeed, so some immersion in the details of James' publication history is inevitable. It doesn't mar the quality of the life that Horne has offered, and for some readers, it may be a further positive inducement to read the thing.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Henry James was not only a great novelist - he also wrote a great deal of entertaining non-fiction, producing reviews and essays on a wide variety of subjects. To mark the centenary of his death, these five anthologies reveal James through his letters, memoirs, essays and private notebooks.

Episode 1: Europe versus America.
Was James English or American? The British tend to regard him as American, the Americans as British. Although born in America, James's wealthy, eccentric father moved the family around constantly - to France, England, Switzerland, Boston - so the young James never felt settled in America. In fact, Henry James lived more of his life in his adopted country of England than in his native America. At the end of his life, he took British nationality in 1915 as a gesture of solidarity and as a protest against American neutrality in the First World War. But in some ways he always remained an outsider, and felt an outsider in both cultures.

James' writing gives us an insight into both societies. After he'd settled in London he composed a negative catalogue about his homeland - the tone hovers somewhere between real critique and self-mockery of the Englishman's snobbery about Americans.

The anthology has been selected by Professor Philip Horne of University College London, who is founding General Editor of a major scholarly edition of James's fiction and has re-transcribed the notebooks for an authoritative new edition.

Reader: Henry Goodman
With introductions by Olivia Williams

Producer: Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071skp7

4* Daisy Miller
3* Washington Square
4* The Ambassadors
4* The Turn of the Screw
4* The Wings of the Dove
4* The Portrait of a Lady
2* The Bostonians
2* The Real Thing
4* The Aspern Papers
3* What Maisie Knew
4* A Little Tour in France
3* The Madonna of the Future
2* Lady Barbarina and Other Tales
4* The Beast in the Jungle
3* The Jolly Corner
3* The Art of Fiction
3* Roderick Hudson
3* Henry James: A Life in Letters
TR The Tragic Muse
TR The Pupil
TR The Other House
TR The Spoils of Poynton
TR The Princess Casamassima
TR Hawthorne
TR The Great Good Place
TR The Art of the Novel
TR The Middle Years
TR The Golden Bowl
TR Nona Vincent
TR Italian Hours
TR The Ivory Tower
TR Ghost Stories
TR The Outcry
TR Collected Travel Writings: The Continent

About Henry James:
3* The Real Henry James by Philip Horne
3* Henry James at Work by Theodora Bosanquet
TR Portraits from life by Ford Madox Ford
TR The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad by F.R. Leavis
TR The Realists: Eight Portraits: by C.P. Snow
TR A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women & His Art by Lyndall Gordon

[Brielle]

I'm not sure what I think of James. He's a bit long-winded. I enjoyed Daisy Miller, I skipped The Aspern Papers entirely, and I'm trudging through Turn of the Screw presently...Some Victorian writers pull off the extended descriptions with a panache that is timeless, James is not that writer.

I give up. I hate it.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confirms the clouded style of the fiction wasn't a put on but simply how Henry thought. It almost boggled the mind to put myself in the place of one of his correspondents and ask "how on earth would I even reply to this?"