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Henry James: His Life Revealed Through His Letters
This new biography of Henry James consisting of a few hundred pages offers an enticing introduction to one of the world’s finest novelists for those who do not have time to read one of the multivolume biographies written about him. Henry James was not only a prolific novelist who wrote over twenty novels and more than a hundred novellas and tales, but also a voluminous correspondent. Even today, more than ten thousand of his letters are still extant. The letters between Henry James and his highly intelligent and perceptive parents and siblings present the biographer with a wealth of information about what was happening in his life and how he viewed it. In addition to this important family correspondence, thousands of letters that James wrote to friends and colleagues over his lifetime offer a rich source for exploring the life behind this literary genius.
To enable readers to experience James’s mind and sensibility at work, Alison Johnson includes long quotations from his letters and his autobiographical works. One intriguing section of the biography concerns his very close relationship to the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson (expatriate niece of James Fenimore Cooper). Johnson includes excerpts from Woolson’s letters to James that indicate she was deeply in love with him and was saddened that his affection for her was not of a nature to lead to marriage. After Woolson jumped to her death from her apartment in Venice during a period of illness and depression, James rushed there from London and spent a few months helping her relatives close up her affairs, while at the same time availing himself of the opportunity to destroy any letters he had written to her that were still in her apartment.
Some of the passages Johnson includes from James’s correspondence also contain evidence about the nature of his infatuations in his later years with several much younger male artists and writers and the extent to which these infatuations may have led to actual sexual experience. Henry James’s own words may be the best summation of his struggle to understand his own feelings for those with whom he established intimate relationships: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart!”
To enable readers to experience James’s mind and sensibility at work, Alison Johnson includes long quotations from his letters and his autobiographical works. One intriguing section of the biography concerns his very close relationship to the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson (expatriate niece of James Fenimore Cooper). Johnson includes excerpts from Woolson’s letters to James that indicate she was deeply in love with him and was saddened that his affection for her was not of a nature to lead to marriage. After Woolson jumped to her death from her apartment in Venice during a period of illness and depression, James rushed there from London and spent a few months helping her relatives close up her affairs, while at the same time availing himself of the opportunity to destroy any letters he had written to her that were still in her apartment.
Some of the passages Johnson includes from James’s correspondence also contain evidence about the nature of his infatuations in his later years with several much younger male artists and writers and the extent to which these infatuations may have led to actual sexual experience. Henry James’s own words may be the best summation of his struggle to understand his own feelings for those with whom he established intimate relationships: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart!”
368 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 5, 2013
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