Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-born British novelist and short story writer admired as the novel’s greatest practitioner.
Born in New York City, James relocated to Europe at age 20, settled in England, took infrequent visits to America, and become a British subject in 1915, a year before his death.
James’s father was a rich philosopher and theologian, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, who considered the best education was a philosophical and scientific one. Henry and his brother, the future psychologist and philosopher William James, were raised with a broad exposure to civilization and culture.
Henry James was taken abroad before he could even talk. He spent substantial amounts of his childhood overseas, and learned with teachers and governesses in London, Paris, Geneva, and Boulogne-Sur-Mer. James’s only exposure to conventional education was his matriculation at the age of 19 at Harvard Law School.
An injury precluded James from participating in the American Civil War. He wrote for over 50 years, creating 20 novels, numerous short stories, 12 plays, and numerous volumes of travel writing and literary criticism, which he labelled “a supremely beneficent art.”
Scholars categorize James’s literary career into three stages. His early period explored the confrontation between Americans and the delicate, and often corrupting, effects of European culture. This period produced Roderick Hudson (1876,) The American (1877,) and Daisy Miller (1879,) and peaked with his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (1881.) James’s second phase was a period of experimentation and failed attempts to succeed as a dramatist. He produced The Aspern Papers (1888,) The Turn of the Screw (1898,) and his three greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902,) The Ambassadors (1903,) and The Golden Bowl (1904.) James’s final literary phase started with his first voyage to America in 20 years. His pessimistic assessment The American Scene (1907) laments, “The large and noble sanities that I see around are” converted to “crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed.”
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Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
—Henry James
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
—Henry James
Topics: Museums
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.
—Henry James
Topics: Conscience
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
—Henry James
Topics: Women, Feminism
Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
—Henry James
Topics: Tact
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
—Henry James
Topics: Books, Reading
For myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that.
—Henry James
Topics: Writing
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