Life & Background
James was born in New York in 1843 into a wealthy, restless intellectual family; his father was a theologian, his elder brother William became the philosopher and psychologist. The children were educated across Europe by tutors, which gave Henry the transatlantic double vision that became his subject. An early back injury kept him out of the Civil War. He settled in England in 1876 and lived there for the rest of his life, in London and then at Lamb House in Rye. His attempt at playwriting ended in humiliation when he was booed at the premiere of Guy Domville in 1895. He turned instead to the dense late novels, dictating them to a typist. In 1915, in protest at American neutrality in the war, he became a British subject; he died the following year.
The Portrait of a Lady
Isabel Archer, a spirited young American, is brought to England by her aunt and is admired by everyone she meets. She refuses two proposals — from the English aristocrat Lord Warburton and from the persistent Caspar Goodwood — because she wishes to see life on her own terms. Her cousin Ralph Touchett, who is dying and who loves her, persuades his father to leave her a large fortune so that she may be free. The money makes her a target. Madame Merle, her elegant friend, steers her towards Gilbert Osmond, an impoverished aesthete in Florence, and Isabel marries him. The marriage becomes a slow suffocation. She learns that Osmond's daughter Pansy is Madame Merle's child and that the whole arrangement was contrived. Offered escape by Goodwood at the end, she returns to Rome.
James's method is the centre of consciousness: the story is filtered through a single mind's perception rather than told by an omniscient narrator, so that the drama is a drama of what Isabel understands and when. The famous chapter of her night-long vigil by the fire, in which nothing happens but a woman thinking, is the technique's demonstration and was singled out by James himself in the preface as the best thing in the book. The prefaces he wrote for the New York Edition, collected as The Art of the Novel, are the first sustained poetics of fiction in English, giving criticism the terms centre of consciousness, the scenic method, and the injunction to dramatise. His famous distinction between showing and telling descends from these.
Why James Matters
James established the novel as a self-conscious art form in English, and his essay The Art of Fiction, answering Walter Besant, is a foundational document of novel theory. His international theme — American innocence and energy meeting European experience and corruption — defines a whole strand of transatlantic fiction. The Turn of the Screw remains the standard test case for the unreliable narrator and for competing psychoanalytic and supernatural readings, and his late style, in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, marks the threshold of modernism.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Daisy Miller1878
- The Portrait of a Lady1881
- The Art of Fiction1884
- The Bostonians1886
- The Turn of the Screw1898
- The Wings of the Dove1902
- The Ambassadors1903
- The Golden Bowl1904