A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art

by Lyndall Gordon

An exploration of influences in Henry James's life shows how his cousin Minny Temple, the hero of his youth, and writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, an ambitious and skilled author, had a lasting effect on the developing novelist.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir

500 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1998

About the author

Lyndall Gordon (born 4 November 1941) is a British-based writer and academic, known for her literary biographies. She is a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York City. She married the pathologist Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.

Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publication is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has overturned the established assumptions about the poet's life.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an interesting angle from which to write a biography, focusing not just on James himself but two women who, Gordon argues, were the sources of forms of femininity to which his fiction returns repeatedly.

I'd never read anything about James's life before and was struck by how limited he was or allowed himself to be, especially in the face of his books, so astute as they are in their understanding of inner lives, their acute emotional intelligence. Yet his treatment of his cousin Minny Temple, especially, is so cold, ignoring (or pretending to ignore) her desperate desire to travel to Europe despite her illness.

The transformation of Milly into Jamesian heroines (Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Milly Theale) is well known. The second woman Gordon focuses on is Constance Fenimore Woolson, a novelist in her own right and friend of James's later years. The connections here are looser, more oblique, even less convincing.

Overall, this gave me an insight into James but the Woolson connection isn't the most illuminating (though it's interesting to see how a female American novelist fares in the later nineteenth century). There's too much storytelling of the relevant James novels and stories, not enough analysis.

Do we really get to grips here with the secrets of James's inner life? I don't think so.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "A Private Life of Henry James", Lyndall Gordon attempts to excavate the submerged world of Henry James' imagination and his relationship with the most important women in his life. The analysis concentrates on James' cousin Minny Temple, whose early death haunted James, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, his friend and fellow writer, whose suicide deeply effected him. Gordon shows with numerous detailed examples the process by which James transformed his experiences and relationships into high art. The thrust of the book can be discerned from this passage, which shows how James' transformative process, resulting in the story 'The Altar of the Dead', began to lay the groundwork for his late masterpiece, 'The Wings of the Dove':"The vision of Mary Antrim [a character in the story] stirred the idea for a full-scale portrait of a dying girl. A young creature 'on the threshold of a life that has seemed boundless, is suddenly condemned to death', he jotted, 'by the voice of a physician'. Like Minny, the young woman 'is in love with life, her dreams of it have been immense, and she clings to it with a passion, with supplication'. Waiting all this time was the unused passion in Minny's dream. ... To spell out thee biographical sources limits the leap James took in the autumn of 1894, so that, by the end of 'The Altar of the Dead', he stood on the brink of his 'major phase'. James insisted that it was by the treatment rather than the source that works of art should be judged. The aesthetic achievements that lay ahead came with his power to transform his subject. The writer's art removes the act of memory to a realm of its own which re-creates Mary Temple as a winged angel and Constance Woolson as a figure of grief. Their purity is distilled from the disturbing contexts of actual deaths, they are conjoined as tutelary forms, guides to transcendence, no longer women as we understand the word, more like the concentrated essence Alice felt herself to be as she approached death."

This book provides a full and richly analysis of many of James' short stories and key novels, analysis illuminated by a well-documented examination of James' life.

[Jee Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The full title of this 1998 biography is A Private Life of Henry James: Two women and his art. It is not one biography, but three, and focuses on the intersections--social, emotional and imaginative--between the writer and the women. James met his cousin Mary (Minnie) Temple when he was still a young man, and was immediately taken by her bold, capacious approach towards life. Later, already an established writer, he met Constance Fenimore Woolsoon, or rather she met him, for she journeyed to Rome after reading his fiction, hoping to find a common spirit and a willing mentor.

In adopting this biographical approach, Gordon makes no bones about what she is doing. In the sphere of art, she aims to elevate the women, in particular Woolson, from mere muses or handmaidens to actual collaborators in James's fiction. She does not mean that Woolson helped write James's works. Rather, the stories that Woolson wrote elicited a conversation with James who replied in his own stories. In explaining so convincingly the exchange in fiction between the two writers, Gordon wishes to demolish the myth of the self-sufficient artist working in creative solitude, a myth of himself first started by James, and sustained by his destruction of letters and papers before he died.

In the sphere of life, or human relations, Gordon depicts James as a predator of souls, especially women's souls, which he took as his artistic material and kingdom. James in this portrait emerges as a ruthless artist who cared supremely for his art. He would draw close to usable women in order to extract their stories, only to withdraw from them when their human demands impinged on his art. Minnie Temple was dying, but thought that a visit to Rome might help her recover. James, along with other family members who claimed to love her, ignored her desperate pleas because such a visit was not on his agenda.

Even more damning was his behavior towards Woolson. The two were so close that they shared a house, Villa Brichieri, in Bellosguardo, for a time, risking exposure and scandal. But James did not provide the friendship or mentoring Woolson longed for. Given an opportunity to promote his friend, James wrote an essay that damned her with faint and limited praise. He did not come to her at her hour of need and she killed herself by jumping from the balcony of her house. Gordon shows that the suicide not only shocked James but angered him, for Woolson's action demonstrated that he did not understand women's souls the way he claimed he did. Bewildered, James put out the story that Woolson killed herself in a moment of insanity. In a thrilling section of the book, Gordon examined closely the reports of Woolson's last night, and concluded that, contrary to James's fantasy, Woolson took her own life with deliberate intention.

James was highly conscious of what he was doing. This awareness was dramatized, again and again, in his fiction. Gordon puts it this way, in the final paragraphs of her reparative biography:

In Jamesian dramas of contrition, a man uses a single woman, May, Maria, or Milly, for his own ends; then recoils from usage of this kind. And yet, James himself continued to use two women as the material of art. It is consistent with the Lesson of the Master that art, of necessity, preys on others. This is the questionable point where James the man meets James the writer. He drew women out as no other man, exposing needs that lurk unexpressed on the evolutionary frontier; and then swerved from responsibility. Fenimore took a calculated risk when she made a 'home' in his work. His involvements were for readers, for posterity, and only in passing for subjects whose need for reciprocity remained active. For this reason, he was in his element with those who died.

Jamesian heroes of the major phase often excoriate themselves more relentlessly than evidence against them might seem to justify. Their own sole detractors, they gape at their flaw: the oblivion of the sensitive gentleman. Of course, only a person of the calibre of James would have the moral courage to confront it.

Here is a fictional truth James offered in lieu of biography. He is right, of course, to urge the autonomy of art, were it not for one problem, a myth of solitary genius. That myth, it must now be apparent, is largely untrue. For James leant on the generosity of women who surrendered 'the Light of their Lives'. Feeling, breathing women who provided the original matter for Milly and Miss Gostrey were disappointed in untold ways not unconnected with their deaths. It is on behalf of these women that biography must redress the record James controlled.

Beware, beware, of falling for a writer.

[David Rank · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and well-written, if a bit dry, bio of the great American writer who proved to be less than a likeable human being when it came to his ability to relate to others.

[Laurie Hertz-Kafka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I totally enjoyed this book, which tells the story of two lesser-know yet significant relationships in his life and how they influenced his art. It also goes into the other influences and places him in the context of other writers of his time as well as before and after. It read like a novel and took me away to the time and place of his life. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Lyndall Gordon.

[Allegra Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning book, Jamesian in its subtlety, its complexity, and its devastating revelations. Gordon's account fascinated me. Her research is impeccable, her use of sources well judged, her point of view never forced. It seems clear to me that Colm Toibin used this book as his source for his novel, "The Master."

[Elisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew nothing of Henry James and this was a decently interesting biography and literary criticism of his work. Read this before reading any of his novels. It argues that he derived a lot of his characters and their desires from the women in his life.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Gordon's style is a bit of a struggle to read, the actual content of this biography is really interesting. I was especially fascinated with the discussion of the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and I'll definitely be reading some of her work.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art, intimacy, renunciation. Practically a bio of Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose work it inspires me to read.