Henry James

Henry James was an American-British author born in Manhattan, New York City, on 15 April 1843, and he died on 28 February 1916. He stands between literary realism and literary modernism, and many consider him among the greatest novelists in the English language. His life joined two sides of the Atlantic: born in the United States, he spent much of his life abroad, largely relocated to Europe in his thirties, settled in England, and became a British citizen in 1915, one year before his death.

James came from a remarkable family. His father, Henry James Sr., was a theologian, lecturer, and philosopher with independent means; his brother William James became a philosopher and psychologist; his sister Alice James became a diarist. His mother, Mary Walsh, came from a wealthy New York family. As a child, Henry lived between New York, Albany, and Europe. His father planned an education that exposed him to many influences, especially scientific and philosophical ones, though it was later described as “extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous.”

Travel shaped James early. Between 1855 and 1860, the family moved among London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bonn, and Newport, Rhode Island. In France, Henry began to feel at home and became fluent in French; a stutter that appeared when he spoke English did not appear in French. He was a strong reader from boyhood, a “devourer of libraries,” as his father once wrote, and he wrote novels and dramas while still young. In Newport, he befriended Thomas Sergeant Perry and the painter John La Farge, who introduced him to French literature, especially Balzac. James later called Balzac his “greatest master” and said he learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else.

James is best known for novels about the social and marital interplay among émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans. The Portrait of a Lady appeared in 1881. His later books became more experimental, including The Wings of the Dove in 1902, The Ambassadors in 1903, and The Golden Bowl in 1904. In these works, he often placed ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions beside one another as he traced a character’s mind and social world. Because of that ambiguity and the way the books are composed, his late fiction has been compared to Impressionist painting.

He also wrote criticism, travel writing, biography, autobiography, plays, and ghost stories. His novella The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, became the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He also wrote other admired ghost stories, including “The Jolly Corner” in 1908. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. His sentences still draw readers because they ask us to look closely at motive, silence, and social pressure. Jorge Luis Borges, after reading widely across literatures, said he knew “of no stranger work than that of Henry James.”