Henry James (Magill Book Reviews)

Henry James, a member of a prominent American family that included his father, Henry James, Sr., a well-known religious writer, and his brother, William James, the famous philosopher and psychologist, was an expatriated writer who maintained a voluminous correspondence with his family and American friends. Kaplan bases this biography on a close reading of approximately twelve thousand unpublished letters of the James household, revealing James’s personal and private opinions about family members, leading artistic figures of the era, and Victorian sexual mores.

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York. Following a childhood during which the family moved constantly between Europe and America, James began a career as a writer in the 1860’s, composing reviews for the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW and THE NATION. James soon permanently relocated to England, where he found the cultural climate much more conducive to literary work. Over the next four decades, before his death in 1916, James produced more than twenty novel-length works and many shorter tales, while also writing nonfiction and associating closely with artistic figures such as Browning, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Stevenson, Sargent, Kipling, Howells, Wells, Conrad, Crane, and Wharton.

Kaplan skillfully combines James’s public statements concerning art with the often intensely personal private correspondence. He reads James’s life on two levels: the first is the lifelong influence of the emotionally charged James household, dominated by a controlling father and complicated by sibling rivalry; the second is James’s relationships with his artistic compatriots, often filled in his later years with homoerotic overtones. Such a situation presents a perfect opportunity for a psychoanalytic rewriting of the master’s life, well-blended with the context of the times.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIX, October 1, 1992, p. 229.

Chicago Tribune. December 20, 1992, XIV, p. 5.

Kirkus Reviews. LX, September 15, 1992, p. 1167.

Library Journal. CXVII, September 15, 1992, p. 64.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 3, 1993, p. 4.

New Statesman and Society. V, December 11, 1992, p. 38.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, November 22, 1992, p. 12.

The New Yorker. LXVIII, November 2, 1992, p. 119.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, September 21, 1992, p. 84.

The Spectator. CCLXIX, November 21, 1992, p. 44.