U.S. Authors - 19th Century - Literary Biography, American & Canadian Letters, American Fiction & Literature Classics, Classics By Subject

Henry James: A Life in Letters

Name: Henry James: A Life in Letters
Author: Philip Horne
ISBN: 9780140435160

by Philip Horne

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Overview

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.

Author Biography: Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York City. In 1865, he began writing reviews and stories for American journals. 1875 found him settled in Paris, then London, where he was very popular in society. He became a British citizen in 1915. He was a highly prolific writer of novels, short stories, and letters.

Author Biography: Philip Horne was educated at Cambridge University and is currently a reader in English literature at University College London. He edited the Penguin Classics edition of The Tragic Muse.

About the Author, Philip Horne

Henry James

Henry James was a master at tracing the social boundaries of the Gilded Age -- between Old and New World, Europe and America, desire and convention, men and women. He brought an invaluably clear-eyed, and critical, sensibility to America's evolving cultural mores.

Biography

Henry James (1843-1916), born in New York City, was the son of noted religious philosopher Henry James, Sr., and brother of eminent psychologist and philosopher William James. He spent his early life in America and studied in Geneva, London and Paris during his adolescence to gain the worldly experience so prized by his father. He lived in Newport, went briefly to Harvard Law School, and in 1864 began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines. In 1869, and then in 1872-74, he paid visits to Europe and began his first novel, Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875 he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola, and wrote The American (1877). In December 1876 he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. Other famous works include Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and three large novels of the new century, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1905 he revisited the United States and wrote The American Scene (1907). During his career, he also wrote many works of criticism and travel. Although old and ailing, he threw himself into war work in 1914, and in 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject. In 1916 King George V conferred the Order of Merit on him. He died in London in February 1916.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

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Editorials

Renee Tursi

...a wonderful new bundling of nearly 150 unpublished letters—set amid a felicitous selection from those already in print...
— New York Times Book Review

St. Louis Dispatch

This highly sympathetic, splendidly wrought volume will be a treasure for James lovers and perhaps a revelation to many others.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

By his subtitle, Horne (Henry James and Revision) explicitly rejects Leon Edel's contention in his four-volume (1974-1984) selection of James's letters that letters "offer only fragments of a life," since the inner life is seldom exposed overtly in correspondence. Horne's strategy is to introduce many letters in this single volume with italicized headnotes that fill in some narrative gaps. Edel, however, published 1100 letters to Horne's 296, and of James's nearly 73 years, the first half is covered here by only 51 missives. Yet ardent Jamesians will want this edition for its 148 previously unpublished correspondences. Horne also furnishes an appendix, of interest mainly to scholars, of 60 pages of textual changes and six more in foreign words and phrases. In a one-volume sampling, this is a heavy price to pay for unseen documents. While Edel prints 34 letters encompassing the first year of the Great War (1914-1915), the last full year of James's life, Horne can only manage 14. Dimensions of James inevitably vanish, although his maddeningly ornate later style comes through. While mannerisms are thrust aside when James calls Oscar Wilde "an unclean beast" and faint-praises Ellen Terry as "beautiful as an image and abominable as an actress," he can be as evasive as he is direct. French novelists "have lost the perception of anything in nature but the genital organs," he declares. But the later James, less timid and a homophile at least by post, praises A.C. Benson for rendering "the most difficult & elusive parts" of Walter Pater, "...pressing it"--the "parts"--"so intelligently hard... & playing all over it such fine penetrating restless finger-tips!" While Horne discreetly makes nothing of that, a prying Jamesians surely will. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

As a novelist, James portrayed the social manners of cultured, Gilded Age Americans at home and abroad. He was also a prolific letter writer whose epistolary output is unrivaled in the history of American literature. Horne, who edited James's The Tragic Muse, gathers a selection of James's voluminous correspondence and arranges it to provide biographical insights into James's development as a novelist and critic. Half of the 296 letters in this collection have not been published previously. In his writings to William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Charles Eliot Norton (among others), James discusses not only writing but also his feelings about feminism, sex, and politics. Horne introduces each letter with a brief headnote about its relationship to James's life and closes them with extensive textual notes. After 2000, the University of Nebraska will begin publishing its 30-volume edition of James 12,000 to 15,000 letters; for now, only large academic libraries with an extensive James collection will want to buy this book.--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, OH Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.