I.

Introduction

Henry James (1843-1916), American expatriate writer, whose masterly fiction juxtaposed American innocence and European experience in a series of intense, psychologically complex works. James’s work is characterized by leisurely pacing and subtle delineation of character rather than by dramatic incidents or complicated plots. His major writings, highly sensitive examples of the objective psychological novel, deal with the world of leisure and sophistication he had grown to know intimately in Europe.

II.

Early Life

Henry, the younger brother of philosopher William James, was born in New York City. He spent his childhood and early youth in unusually stimulating surroundings. He belonged to a novel-reading, play-going family that vigorously discussed everything it read and saw. Distinguished friends of Henry’s father, such as Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, were frequent visitors to the household.

The James family had money and periodically lived in Europe. Henry was educated at schools and by tutors in New York City; London, England; Paris, France; and Geneva, Switzerland. But his education came as much from his walks, his reading, and his visits to parks and museums in European cities, where he observed the people around him.

In 1860 the James family returned from Europe and settled in Newport, Rhode Island. There, James developed a friendship with American painter John La Farge. Their friendship marked the beginning of a lifelong interest: Many of the major characters in James’s works are artists, and he often derived his imagery from painting. James soon began writing. While still in his early 20s he began to contribute short stories and articles to American periodicals. The American novelist William Dean Howells encouraged him and introduced his work to the magazine The Atlantic Monthly.

III.

Years in Europe

In 1869 James traveled to Europe on his own. He observed not only the countries but also his fellow citizens: Americans adrift in Europe. He saw them as bewildered by an environment with deep historical associations and filled with a sense of the beauty around them as well as feelings of unease at the human corruption they observed. His year abroad provided James with the international theme of much of his fiction. In many cases, an innocent American is lured but finally betrayed by Europe.

James returned to Europe in 1872. He spent most of the next two years working on Roderick Hudson (1875), a novel describing the disintegration of a young American sculptor living in Rome. Soon after finishing it, he decided to settle permanently in Europe. In 1875 James moved to Paris, where he finished his novel The American (1877). But he felt himself an outsider in France and in 1876 went to England to live.

Except for visits to the United States and travels in Europe, James spent the rest of his life in England. In 1897 James purchased Lamb House in the town of Rye, where he divided his time between writing and entertaining visitors. James became a British citizen in 1915 to protest the neutrality of the United States in the early years of World War I (1914-1918).

IV.

Early Works

In his early novels and tales, James’s theme was the impact of European culture on Americans traveling or living abroad. For James, America and Europe each had both a positive and a negative side. The positive aspect of the American character was its vitality, reliability, and innocence. The negative side was a tendency to oversimplify life and to mistrust beauty, art, and sensuality. The European character, James felt, was positive in its appreciation of beautiful and pleasurable experience as well as in its sophisticated awareness of the complexities of human nature. Its negative side was its lack of moral standards and its expedience. For example, to get what they want—usually money—James’s European characters deceive their American friends, manipulating, betraying, and even destroying them.

The publication of Daisy Miller (1879), a novella about a naive American girl in conflict with the conventions of European society, brought James favorable critical attention. His novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) established his reputation as a major literary figure.

The Portrait of a Lady concerns a young American woman, Isabel Archer, who comes to England after her father dies. Archer is ardent, vibrant, hungry for experience, and committed to her personal freedom. She forms a friendship with an older woman, Madame Merle, who introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, the man Archer marries. Archer believes Osmond to be a man of impeccable taste with whom she can share an intense but liberated life. Instead he turns out to be a cynical dilettante and totally conventional. Eventually Archer learns that Osmond and Merle have been lovers and have plotted her marriage to get hold of her fortune.

V.

Middle Works

James abandoned the international theme during the middle period of his writing, from 1881 to 1900. During the 1880s he published Washington Square (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), and The Tragic Muse (1890). In the early 1890s James made several unsuccessful attempts at playwriting. During the middle period, he also became preoccupied with ghost stories and with tales of tortured childhood—What Maisie Knew (1897)—and adolescence—The Awkward Age (1899). These concerns come together in his novella The Turn of the Screw (1898).

The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima are concerned with reformers. The Bostonians, which grew partly out of the contemporary feminist movement, focuses on two women with contrasting personalities. The conflict that results has some sexual overtones. The hero of The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson, disgusted by the appalling conditions of London’s poor, joins a radical movement. When Robinson is selected to perform an assassination, he is torn between his belief in socialism and his duty as a civilized member of society.

James based The Turn of the Screw on the notion that the spirits of bad, dead servants come back to corrupt innocent children. In his story, the children’s governess believes in these ghosts who are gaining hold of the children, but she is the only one who can see them. The reader is left to wonder whether these ghosts are simply figments of her own imagination, and if she herself is corrupting the children. By suggesting rather than clarifying, James lets the reader imagine the more frightening evil.

VI.

Last Works

In his last and greatest novels James returns to the international theme. The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) again draw contrasts between American and European societies. In general, the style of James’s later works is complex, with the motives and behavior of his characters revealed indirectly by means of their conversations and through their minute observations of one another.

The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors deal with trusting, innocent Americans who are deceived. The discovery of the deception hastens the death of the American heiress Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, but she was doomed to die in any case. The events of The Ambassadors are the perceptions of the novel’s narrator and hero, Lambert Strether. Its theme is the lasting value of the insights Strether gains from these perceptions, although he chooses not to act upon them.

The Golden Bowl is often considered James’s most difficult work. It deals with an American woman living in London and her widowed millionaire father. Although absorbed in one another, both marry other people whom they keep at a distance. The plot is complicated because the characters are usually acting upon knowledge they are attempting to conceal from each other. The style is especially elaborate and convoluted, and the fate of the characters is uncertain. However, The Golden Bowl is a powerful moral study and a masterful depiction of the anguish that accompanies important human relationships.

VII.

Conclusion

James was a prolific author. He produced 20 full-length novels, a dozen novellas, and more than 100 tales. In addition to fiction his writing includes literary criticism, biography, and travel essays. Notable among his travel writings are English Hours (1905) and The American Scene (1907), impressions of his native country after an absence of 20 years. His numerous letters were published in four volumes. James’s reputation as one of the greatest novelists in the English language was not firmly established until after his death.

James was an experimenter in the craft of fiction. He explored new ways of seeing and shaping life through new ways of telling a story. James preferred not to render events, but rather someone’s impression of events. In his late fiction especially, the story is told through the eyes of an interested, usually perceptive observer. James felt this made the work more compelling since the reader sees only what the observer sees and follows the workings of the observer’s mind as he or she tries to understand the meanings of various appearances in the outside world. Typically, these appearances are misleading. The “action” in the novels consists of the observer gradually penetrating appearances and comprehending the truth.

James’s technique of dramatizing thought profoundly altered the history of the novel. His influence can be seen in the works of such authors as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.