A " Boston marriage " was, historically, the cohabitation of two wealthy women, independent of financial support from a man. The term is said to have been in use in New England in the late 19th–early 20th century. Some of these relationships were romantic in nature and might now be considered a lesbian relationship; others were not.
112-501: The Bostonians is a novel by Henry James , first published as a serial in The Century Magazine in 1885–1886 and then as a book in 1886. This bittersweet tragicomedy centres on an odd triangle of characters: Basil Ransom, a political conservative from Mississippi ; Olive Chancellor, Ransom's cousin and a Boston feminist; and Verena Tarrant, a pretty, young protégée of Olive's in the feminist movement . The storyline concerns
224-401: A Lady ; others do not. The three central characters are surrounded by a vivid supporting cast of would-be reformers, cynical journalists, and sometimes sinister hangers-on. The title refers, not to the people of Boston in general, but to the two characters Olive and Verena, "as they appeared to the mind of Ransom, the southerner, and outsider, looking at them from New York". The Bostonians
336-584: A cousin of the James family came down to the house in Fourteenth Street and, one evening during his stay, read the first instalment of David Copperfield aloud to the elders of the family: Henry Junior had sneaked down from his bedroom to listen surreptitiously to the reading, until a scene involving the Murdstones led him to "loud[ly] sob," whereupon he was discovered and sent back to bed. Between 1855 and 1860,
448-612: A dramatisation of his popular novella Daisy Miller in 1882. From 1890 to 1892, having received a bequest that freed him from magazine publication, he made a strenuous effort to succeed on the London stage, writing a half-dozen plays, of which only one, a dramatisation of his novel The American , was produced. This play was performed for several years by a touring repertory company, and had a respectable run in London, but did not earn very much money for James. His other plays written at this time were not produced. In 1893, however, he responded to
560-662: A freelance writer in Rome and then secured a position as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune through the influence of its editor, John Hay . When these efforts failed, he returned to New York City. During 1874 and 1875, he published Transatlantic Sketches , A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson . In 1875, James wrote for The Nation every week; he received anywhere from $ 3 to $ 10 for brief paragraphs, $ 12 to $ 25 for book reviews and $ 25 to $ 40 for travel articles and lengthier items. During this early period in his career, he
672-456: A house, 58 West Fourteenth Street , in Manhattan. A painting of a view of Florence by Thomas Cole hung in the front parlor of this house on West Fourteenth. His education was calculated by his father to expose him to many influences, primarily scientific and philosophical; it was described by Percy Lubbock, the editor of his selected letters, as "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous." Once,
784-409: A letter from him, she begins to fear that he will take her young protegée away. When the two women return to their temporary quarters on Tenth Avenue, before going out to dine with Henry Burrage, they find two notes, one from Basil requesting an hour of Verena's time and another from Mrs. Burrage inviting Olive to her house for a conversation. During her meeting with Mrs. Burrage, Olive discovers that she
896-482: A living, however, and lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the common bonds of masculine society. He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality. Edmund Wilson compared James's objectivity to Shakespeare's: One would be in
1008-799: A long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two". In letters to Hugh Walpole, he pursues convoluted jokes and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who "paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well-meaning old trunk". His letters to Walter Berry printed by the Black Sun Press have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism. However, James corresponded in equally extravagant language with his many female friends, writing, for example, to fellow novelist Lucy Clifford : "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to
1120-503: A new group of women, known as new women , who were not financially dependent upon men. Educated women with careers who wanted to live with other women were allowed a measure of social acceptance and freedom to arrange their own lives. They were usually feminists with shared values, involved in social and cultural causes. Such women were generally self-sufficient in their own lives, but gravitated to each other for support in an often disapproving, sexist, and sometimes hostile society. Until
1232-560: A number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon . Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers have objected to Edel's account. James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from
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#17330847369751344-430: A once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was nonexistent. Novick also criticised Edel for following the discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure." The difference of opinion erupted in a series of exchanges between Edel (and later Fred Kaplan filling in for Edel) and Novick, which were published by the online magazine Slate , with Novick arguing that even
1456-489: A position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century— Racine and Molière , whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare , when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not, like Dickens and Hardy , writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like Balzac , nor prophets like Tolstoy : they are occupied simply with
1568-587: A prominent example is that of novelist Sarah Orne Jewett and her companion Annie Adams Fields , widow of the editor of The Atlantic Monthly , during the late 1800s. Lillian Faderman provided one of the most comprehensive studies of Boston marriages in Surpassing the Love of Men (1981). 20th-century film reviewers used the term to describe the Jewett-Fields relationship depicted in the 1998 documentary film Out of
1680-409: A repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity. Philip Guedalla jokingly described three phases in the development of James's prose: "James I, James II, and The Old Pretender," and observers do often group his works of fiction into three periods. In his apprentice years, culminating with
1792-573: A request from actor-manager George Alexander for a serious play for the opening of his renovated St. James's Theatre, and wrote a long drama, Guy Domville , which Alexander produced. A noisy uproar arose on the opening night, 5 January 1895, with hissing from the gallery when James took his bow after the final curtain, and the author was upset. The play received moderately good reviews and had a modest run of four weeks before being taken off to make way for Oscar Wilde 's The Importance of Being Earnest , which Alexander thought would have better prospects for
1904-663: A series of adverbs. The overall effect could be a vivid evocation of a scene as perceived by a sensitive observer. It has been debated whether this change of style was engendered by James's shifting from writing to dictating to a typist, a change made during the composition of What Maisie Knew . In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James's later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th-century fiction. Indeed, he might have influenced stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf , who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them. Both contemporary and modern readers have found
2016-405: A serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honourable motives, while others are more self-interested. James stated in his autobiographical books that Milly was based on Minny Temple, his beloved cousin, who died at an early age of tuberculosis. He said that he attempted in the novel to wrap her memory in the "beauty and dignity of art". James
2128-457: A ship and sneaked them through customs, allowing her to bury him in their family plot. James regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and after settling in London, proclaimed himself "a bachelor". F. W. Dupee , in several volumes on the James family, originated the theory that he had been in love with his cousin, Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism ...
2240-499: A stutter, which seems to have manifested itself only when he spoke English; in French, he did not stutter. In the summer of 1857, the James family went to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where they set up house at No. 20 Rue Neuve Chaussée, and where Henry was a regular customer at an English lending library. In the autumn of that year, Henry Senior wrote from Boulogne to a friend that "Henry is not so fond of study, properly so-called, as of reading...He
2352-606: A young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka , Melville , and Bloy ; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James." James
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#17330847369752464-552: Is a devourer of libraries, and an immense writer of novels and dramas. He has considerable talent as a writer, but I am at a loss to know whether he will ever accomplish much." William recorded in a letter to their parents in Paris, while the boys were staying in Bonn, that Henry and Garth Wilkinson would wrestle "when study has made them dull and sleepy." In 1860, the family returned to Newport. There, Henry befriended Thomas Sergeant Perry , who
2576-454: Is acting on behalf of her son, who still wants to marry Verena. Though she despises men and wants to hold onto Verena, Olive gives serious thought to supporting Mrs. Burrage's proposal after she leaves her house. But when she returns to Tenth Avenue, she discovers that Verena has gone out walking with Basil. During their walk Basil expounded on his belief that women should not be granted suffrage and legal equality to men because their proper sphere
2688-431: Is as easy to understand Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians . He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms". Rebecca West described the book, in her biography of Henry James, as "a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to 'come off'". She praised the book's language and themes, but thought
2800-503: Is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James . He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady . His later works, such as The Ambassadors , The Wings of
2912-466: Is equally fascinated. She persuades Verena to leave her parents' house, move in with her and study in preparation for a career in the feminist movement. Meanwhile, Ransom returns to his law practice in New York, which is not doing well. Still enchanted with Verena, he visits Boston again, travels to Cambridge where she is visiting her parents, and walks with her through the grounds of Harvard College, including
3024-459: Is exercised well or badly. His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse, and as his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work : When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light ... His novels are
3136-400: Is generally straightforward and, though personally characteristic, well within the norms of 19th-century fiction. Roderick Hudson (1875) is a Künstlerroman that traces the development of the title character, an extremely talented sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of immaturity—this was James's first serious attempt at a full-length novel—it has attracted favourable comment due to
3248-452: Is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, The Portrait of a Lady is described as a psychological novel , exploring the minds of his characters, and almost a work of social science, exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans, the old and the new worlds. The second period of James's career, which extends from
3360-580: Is the subject of contention among James's biographers, but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasierotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment." His numerous letters to the many young homosexual men among his close male friends are more forthcoming. To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis , James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile, I can only try to live without you." In another letter Sturgis, following
3472-443: Is to have lived & loved & cursed & floundered & enjoyed & suffered—I don't think I regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth". The interpretation of James as living a less austere emotional life has been subsequently explored by other scholars. The often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship has also been the subject of studies. Author Colm Tóibín has said that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 's Epistemology of
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3584-411: Is when this interest leads Mr. James to push his characters too near the brink of nature that we step back and decline to follow. Mark Twain vowed that he would rather be damned to John Bunyan 's heaven than read the book. The letter in which Twain wrote this remark also contains invectives against the works of George Eliot and Nathaniel Hawthorne . Albert Bigelow Paine wrote in his annotation: "It
3696-509: Is within the home as a wife and mother. Attracted by his manner and personality, but appalled by his views, Verena leaves him and falls into Olive's arms, begging in tears that they immediately quit New York and return to Boston. The story picks up sometime later. Olive and Verena have taken an August holiday in Cape Cod, where Verena is preparing for her first important public appearance as an advocate of feminism. Olive has hired an agent and rented
3808-645: The 54th Massachusetts . In 1864, the James family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to be near William, who had enrolled first in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and then in the medical school. In 1862, Henry attended Harvard Law School , but realised that he was not interested in studying law. He pursued his interest in literature and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston and Cambridge and formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ,
3920-512: The Atlantic Monthly . The novel was later published in book form in 1878. During a 14-month trip through Europe in 1869–70, he met John Ruskin , Charles Dickens , Matthew Arnold , William Morris , and George Eliot . Rome impressed him profoundly. "Here I am then in the Eternal City", he wrote to his brother William. "At last—for the first time—I live!" He attempted to support himself as
4032-531: The Old World (Europe), embodying a feudal civilisation that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive , and embody the virtues of the new American society—particularly personal freedom and a more exacting moral character. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power
4144-467: The " New York Edition ", a 24-volume collection of his works. In 1910, his brother William died; Henry had just joined William from an unsuccessful search for relief in Europe, on what turned out to be Henry's last visit to the United States (summer 1910 to July 1911) and was near him when he died. In 1913, he wrote his autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother . After
4256-472: The 1880s was The Tragic Muse . Although he was following the precepts of Zola in his novels of the '80s, their tone and attitude are closer to the fiction of Alphonse Daudet. The lack of critical and financial success for his novels during this period led him to try writing for the theatre; His dramatic works and his experiences with theatre are discussed below. In the last quarter of 1889, "for pure and copious lucre," he started translating Port Tarascon ,
4368-421: The 1920s, these arrangements were widely regarded as natural and respectable. After the 1920s, women in such relationships were increasingly suspected of being in lesbian sexual relationships, so fewer single women chose to live together. Boston marriages were so common at Wellesley College in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the term Wellesley marriage became a popular description. Typically,
4480-423: The 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of 6 May 1904, to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry". How accurate that description might have been
4592-515: The Atlantic. It drew notice perhaps mostly because it depicted a woman whose behaviour is outside the social norms of Europe. He also began his first masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady , which appeared in 1881. In 1877, he first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, home of his friend Charles Milnes Gaskell , whom he had met through Henry Adams. He was much inspired by the darkly romantic abbey and
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4704-546: The Boston Music Hall for Verena's speech. When Basil shows up, he tells Verena that he finally feels able to ask her to marry him because, with the imminent publication an article setting forth his conservative views, he now believes he has a future he can share with her. Verena is more than ever drawn to him, but the death of old Mrs. Birdseye, a companion in their rented cottage and a notable reformer and abolitionist, makes Verena flee again to Boston with Olive, unable to bear
4816-430: The Boston reformers, is, in its way, one of the most masterly things that Henry James ever did". The quiet but significant struggle between Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom does seem more pertinent and engrossing today than it might have appeared to 19th century readers, because it records the struggles of a historical period that has had a profound impact upon the kind of country America has become. F. R. Leavis praised
4928-526: The Closet made a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read as a homosexual writer whose desire to keep his sexuality a secret shaped his layered style and dramatic artistry. According to Tóibín, such a reading "removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary." James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention. James met
5040-512: The Cricket ", published in 1863. About a year later, " A Tragedy of Error ", his first short story, was published anonymously. James's first literary payment was for an appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's novels, written for the North American Review . He wrote fiction and nonfiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly , where Fields was editor. In 1865, Ernest Lawrence Godkin ,
5152-525: The Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting . His novella The Turn of
5264-442: The French writers that he had studied assiduously. Critical reaction and sales were poor. He wrote to Howells that the books had hurt his career rather than helped because they had "reduced the desire, and demand, for my productions to zero". During this time, he became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson , John Singer Sargent , Edmund Gosse , George du Maurier , Paul Bourget , and Constance Fenimore Woolson . His third novel from
5376-506: The James household travelled to London, Paris, Geneva , Boulogne-sur-Mer , Bonn , and Newport, Rhode Island , according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures, retreating to the United States when funds were low. The James family arrived in Paris in July 1855 and took rooms at a hotel in the Rue de la Paix. Some time between 1856 and 1857, when William was fourteen and Henry thirteen,
5488-572: The New York edition of The American , James describes the development of the story in his mind as exactly such: the "situation" of an American, "some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot..." with the focus of the story being on the response of this wronged man. The Portrait of a Lady may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich. In many of his tales, characters seem to exemplify alternative futures and possibilities, as most markedly in " The Jolly Corner ", in which
5600-482: The Past . David Mamet 's play Boston Marriage premiered in 2000 and helped popularize the term. Some women in Boston marriages did so because they felt they had a better connection to women than to men. Some of these women lived together out of necessity; such women were generally financially independent due to family inheritance or career earnings. Women who chose to have a career (doctor, scientist, professor) created
5712-647: The Rhode Island shore, at Portsmouth Grove ; he took walks and had conversations with numerous soldiers and in later years compared this experience to those of Walt Whitman as a volunteer nurse. In the autumn of 1861, James received an injury, probably to his back, while fighting a fire. This injury, which resurfaced at times throughout his life, made him unfit for military service in the American Civil War. His younger brothers Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, however, both served, with Wilkinson serving as an officer in
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#17330847369755824-453: The Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as " The Jolly Corner ". James published articles and books of criticism, travel , biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as
5936-564: The author simply did not like, although James had a definite interest in them: When we say that most of the characters are repellent, we are simply recording the effect which they produce upon the reader by reason of the attitude which the author of their being takes toward them. He does not love them. Why should he ask more of us? But since he is extremely interested in them, and seems never wearied of setting them in every possible light, we also accede to this interest, and if we have time enough strike up an extraordinary intimacy with all parties. It
6048-419: The book as "one of the two most brilliant novels in the language ", the other being James's The Portrait of a Lady . Leavis described it as "wonderfully rich, intelligent and brilliant . . . It could have been written only by James, and it has an overt richness of life such as is not commonly associated with him". James bemoaned the adverse effect that this novel and The Princess Casamassima (published in
6160-449: The book's political content was strained and unnecessary; she believed that James, by emphasising the political aspects of the subject matter, had inadvertently distracted the reader from what he actually had set out to say: "The pioneers who wanted to raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow from the big brass band of America's political movements". Some later critics, though uncomfortable with what they think
6272-425: The book, much discussed recently, is Olive's possible lesbian attraction to Verena. The term Boston marriage came to connote just such an ambiguous co-habiting long-term relationship between two women. James is not explicit here, partially due to the conventions of the time. But this vagueness—because it creates possible ambiguity about Olive's motives—may, or may not, enrich the novel. People divide over how to read
6384-435: The book. To some, as Ransom gets closer to winning Verena, he seems to lose at least some of his creator's sympathy; to others, none at all. To some, he becomes more sympathetic to Olive in the later chapters as she begins to lose Verena; to others, he merely observes her suffering. Some think her painful recognition of her situation somewhat similar to Isabel Archer's long nighttime meditation in chapter 42 of The Portrait of
6496-445: The brooding conscientious mentor. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains his most popular piece of long fiction. The story is of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who "affronts her destiny" and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. The narrative
6608-410: The burdens of child-rearing, tending to husbands, and other domestic duties, thus allowing professional women such as college faculty to focus on their research. There are many examples of Wellesley marriages in the historical record. Faderman documented that in the late 19th century, of the 53 female faculty at Wellesley, only one woman was conventionally married to a man; most of the others lived with
6720-463: The coming season. After the stresses and disappointment of these efforts, James insisted that he would write no more for the theatre, but within weeks had agreed to write a curtain-raiser for Ellen Terry . This became the one-act "Summersoft", which he later rewrote into a short story, "Covering End", and then expanded into a full-length play, The High Bid , which had a brief run in London in 1907, when James made another concerted effort to write for
6832-555: The deaths of those closest to him, including his sister Alice in 1892; his friend Wolcott Balestier in 1891; and Stevenson and Fenimore Woolson in 1894. The sudden death of Fenimore Woolson in January 1894, and the speculations of suicide surrounding her death, were particularly painful for him. Leon Edel wrote that the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson's death were such that "we can read a strong element of guilt and bewilderment in his letters, and, even more, in those extraordinary tales of
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#17330847369756944-422: The film earned other award nominations for costume design and cinematography . The 2005 independent drama film The Californians is an updated adaptation of the story. Henry James Henry James OM ( ( 1843-04-15 ) 15 April 1843 – ( 1916-02-28 ) 28 February 1916) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism , and
7056-476: The founder of The Nation , visited the James family at their Boston residence in Ashburton Place; the purpose of his visit was to solicit contributions from Henry Senior and Henry Junior for the inaugural issue of the journal. Henry Junior was later to describe his friendship with Godkin as "one of the longest and happiest of my life." In 1871, he published his first novel, Watch and Ward , in serial form in
7168-496: The future Supreme Court justice, and with James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields , his first professional mentors. In 1865, Louisa May Alcott visited Boston and dined with the James family; she was to write in her journals that "Henry Jr....was very friendly. Being a literary youth he gave me advice, as if he had been eighty, and I a girl." His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon
7280-403: The impressive Civil War Memorial Hall. Verena finds herself attracted to the charismatic Ransom and, without telling him of her decision, accedes to his request not to disclose their encounter to Olive, who, she well understands, strongly objects to her southern cousin and fears he will come between her and Verena. As Olive prepares Verena to become a platform speaker in the cause of feminism and
7392-670: The late style difficult and unnecessary; his friend Edith Wharton , who admired him greatly, said that some passages in his work were all but incomprehensible. James was harshly portrayed by H. G. Wells as a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that had got into a corner of its cage. The "late James" style was ably parodied by Max Beerbohm in "The Mote in the Middle Distance". More important for his work overall may have been his position as an expatriate , and in other ways an outsider, living in Europe. While he came from middle-class and provincial beginnings (seen from
7504-764: The latter introducing him to the Travellers' and the Reform Clubs . He was also an honorary member of the Savile Club , St James's Club and, in 1882, the Athenaeum Club . In England, he met the leading figures of politics and culture. He continued to be a prolific writer, producing The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), a revision of Watch and Ward (1878), French Poets and Novelists (1878), Hawthorne (1879), and several shorter works of fiction. In 1878, Daisy Miller established his fame on both sides of
7616-480: The liberation of women from male domination, she accepts an invitation to speak in New York to a gathering of fashionable women from Mrs. Burrage, an immensely rich society woman whose son, Henry, had courted Verena in Boston when he was a student at Harvard College, courted her and been rejected. Invited by Mrs. Burrage at the request of Verena, Basil comes to her talk. When Olive learns that Verena had requested Basil's invitation and that, back in Boston, she had received
7728-603: The magazine to serialize the novel. In May 1885, before the serialization had finished and James had been paid any of the money owed to him, Osgood's firm went bankrupt. James was able to recover part of the lost sum by selling the copyright to Macmillan and Co. , which published The Bostonians in a three-volume edition in Britain in February 1886, and in a one-volume edition in the US in May 1886. James
7840-404: The masterwork The Portrait of a Lady , his style was simple and direct (by the standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented widely with forms and methods, generally narrating from a conventionally omniscient point of view. Plots generally concern romance, except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period. In the second period, as noted above, he abandoned
7952-432: The meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others." To his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones : "Dearest Mary Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me wonder if poor unconscious & doting old Célimare [Jones's pet name for James] has 'done' anything, in some dark somnambulism of
8064-501: The next half-dozen years, " The Altar of the Dead " and " The Beast in the Jungle ". The years spent on dramatic works were not entirely a loss. As he moved into the last phase of his career, he found ways to adapt dramatic techniques into the novel form. In the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, James made several trips through Europe. He spent a long stay in Italy in 1887. In 1888, he published
8176-505: The novel shows Verena in tears—not to be her last, James's narrator assures the reader. Unlike much of James' work, The Bostonians deals with explicitly political themes: feminism and the general role of women in society. James was at best ambivalent about the feminist movement: he wrote to a suffragette friend on April 6, 1909: "I confess I am not eager for the avènement of a multitudinous & overwhelming female electorate—& don't see how any man in his senses can be." Another theme in
8288-700: The novel was first published in Century Magazine in 1885, the people of Boston were very displeased: The Bostonians resented its satire upon their intellectual and humanitary aspirations. They resented the author's evident sympathy with his reactionary Southern hero—a sympathy perhaps partly picked up from the British, who admired the Southern gentleman more than the Yankee reformer. The Bostonians considered Miss Birdseye an insulting caricature of Miss Elizabeth Peabody ,
8400-431: The novel's rather static nature and perhaps excessive length, have found more to praise in James' account of the contest for Verena and his description of the wider background of feminism and other reform movements. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938, in his book The Triple Thinkers: Ten Essays on Literature : "The first hundred pages of The Bostonians, with the arrival of the young Southerner in Boston and his first contacts with
8512-799: The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he did war work. In 1915, he became a British citizen and was awarded the Order of Merit the following year. He died on 28 February 1916, in Chelsea, London , and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium . A memorial was built to him in Chelsea Old Church . He had requested that his ashes be buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts. This was not legally possible, but William's wife smuggled his ashes onboard
8624-463: The permission of James's family. Edel's portrayal of James included the suggestion he was celibate, a view first propounded by critic Saul Rosenzweig in 1943. In 1996, Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master , followed by Henry James: The Mature Master (2007). The first book "caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles" as it challenged the previous received notion of celibacy,
8736-456: The perspective of European polite society), he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society, and the settings of his fiction range from working-class to aristocratic , and often describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to make their way in European capitals. He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends. He worked for
8848-415: The presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life. Many of James's stories may also be seen as psychological thought experiments about selection. In his preface to
8960-454: The protagonist and a ghost-doppelganger live alternative American and European lives; and in others, like The Ambassadors, an older James seems fondly to regard his own younger self facing a crucial moment. The first period of James's fiction, usually considered to have culminated in The Portrait of a Lady , concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America. The style of these novels
9072-622: The publication of The Portrait of a Lady through the end of the 19th century, features less popular novels, including The Princess Casamassima , published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885–1886, and The Bostonians , published serially in The Century during the same period. This period also featured James's celebrated Gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898). The third period of James's career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just around
9184-547: The publication of The Europeans , Washington Square , Confidence and The Portrait of a Lady . The period from 1882 to 1883 was marked by several losses. His mother died in January 1882, while James was in Washington, D.C., on an extended visit to America. He returned to his parents' home in Cambridge , where he was together with all four of his siblings for the first time in 15 years. He returned to Europe in mid-1882, but
9296-631: The relationship involved two academic women. This was common from about 1870 until 1920. Until the later part of the 20th century, women were expected to resign from their academic posts upon marriage, so any woman who wanted to keep her academic career had to make housing arrangements other than a home with a husband and children, such as sharing a home with another like-minded single female professor. Additionally, as Lillian Faderman points out, college-educated women commonly found more independence, support, and like-mindedness by partnering with other women. Further, these alternative relationships freed women from
9408-477: The result of a kind of self-analysis, expressed in fiction, which partly freed him from his fears. Other biographers and scholars have not accepted this account, with the more common view being that of F.O. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes [for the theatre]... he felt a resurgence of new energy." Boston marriage The fact of relatively formalized romantic friendships or life partnerships between women predates
9520-466: The same year) had on his critical fortunes. Although he did not turn away from political themes completely, he never again gave political ideas such a prominent place in his fiction. According to Henry James' 'Notebooks', the "initial idea" of The Bostonians came from Alphonse Daudet 's novel The Evangelist , also about an evangelical older woman who draws a young woman under her sway to serve her cause (religion, rather than suffrage). The Bostonians
9632-600: The serialised novel and from 1890 to about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. Finally, in his third and last period he returned to the long, serialised novel. Beginning in the second period, but most noticeably in the third; he increasingly abandoned direct statement in favour of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive imagery. Single paragraphs began to run for page after page, in which an initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, and verbs would be deferred and then preceded by
9744-439: The short novel The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator . In 1897–1898, he moved to Rye, Sussex and wrote The Turn of the Screw ; 1899–1900 had the publication of The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount . During 1902–1904, he wrote The Wings of the Dove , The Ambassadors , and The Golden Bowl . In 1904, he revisited America and lectured on Balzac. In 1906–1910, he published The American Scene and edited
9856-444: The sister-in-law of Hawthorne , associate of Alcott , and friend of Emerson , and therefore too sacrosanct a personage to be placed in a humorous light. But probably most offensive to Boston propriety were the unmistakable indications of Lesbianism in the portrait of Olive Chancellor, which made it a violation of Boston decency and reticence. Horace Scudder reviewed the book in 1886, calling it an unfair treatment of characters whom
9968-472: The spirit, which has ... given you a bad moment, or a wrong impression, or a 'colourable pretext' ... However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life ..." His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson , in whose house he lived for
10080-439: The stage. He wrote three new plays, two of which were in production when the death of Edward VII on 6 May 1910 plunged London into mourning and theatres closed. Discouraged by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work, James did not renew his efforts in the theatre, but recycled his plays as successful novels. The Outcry was a best-seller in the United States when it was published in 1911. During 1890–1893, when he
10192-453: The start of the 20th century: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Critic F. O. Matthiessen called this "trilogy" James's major phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study. The second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove , was the first published because it was not serialised. This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with
10304-402: The struggle between Ransom and Olive for Verena's allegiance and affection, though the novel also includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and quirky eccentrics. Henry James originally entered into an agreement with the Boston publisher James R. Osgood & Co. to publish the book in the United States for $ 4,000. Osgood made a separate agreement with The Century for
10416-414: The suggestion of celibacy went against James's own injunction "live!"—not "fantasize!" A letter James wrote in old age to Hugh Walpole has been cited as an explicit statement of this. Walpole confessed to him of indulging in "high jinks", and James wrote a reply endorsing it: "We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours & mine, what we are talking about—& the only way to know it
10528-573: The surrounding countryside, which feature in his essay "Abbeys and Castles". In particular, the gloomy monastic fishponds behind the abbey are said to have inspired the lake in The Turn of the Screw . While living in London, James continued to follow the careers of the French realists, Émile Zola in particular. Their stylistic methods influenced his own work in the years to come. Hawthorne's influence on him faded during this period, replaced by George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev. The period from 1878 to 1881 had
10640-416: The term Boston marriage and there is a long record of it in England and other European countries. The term Boston marriage became associated with Henry James 's The Bostonians (1886), a novel involving a long-term co-habiting relationship between two unmarried women, " new women ", although James himself never used the term. James' sister Alice lived in such a relationship with Katherine Loring and
10752-455: The third volume of Daudet's adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon . Serialized in Harper's Monthly from June 1890, this translation – praised as "clever" by The Spectator – was published in January 1891 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington . After the stage failure of Guy Domville in 1895, James was near despair and thoughts of death plagued him. His depression was compounded by
10864-430: The thought of abandoning Mrs. Birdseye's ideals and wounding Olive. The story comes to a climax at the Boston Music Hall. When Verena spies Basil in the audience before she comes out to give her address, she refuses to go on. Despite the presence of a policeman guarding the door back stage, Basil is able to enter and persuade Verena to elope with him, to the distress of Olive and her fellow-feminists. The final sentence of
10976-557: The two brothers visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace. Henry studied primarily with tutors, and briefly attended schools while the family travelled in Europe. A tutor of the James children in Paris, M. Lerambert, had written a volume of verse that was well reviewed by Sainte-Beuve. Their longest stays were in France, where Henry began to feel at home and became fluent in French. He had
11088-404: The vivid realisation of the three major characters: Roderick Hudson, superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable; Rowland Mallet, Roderick's limited but much more mature friend and patron; and Christina Light, one of James's most enchanting and maddening femmes fatales . The pair of Hudson and Mallet has been seen as representing the two sides of James's own nature: the wildly imaginative artist and
11200-455: Was among his sources for the novel. Some examples of women in "Boston marriages" were well known. In the late 1700s, for example, Anglo-Irish upper-class women Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were identified as a couple and nicknamed the Ladies of Llangollen . Elizabeth Mavor suggests that the institution of romantic friendships between women reached a zenith in 18th-century England. In the U.S.,
11312-547: Was back in America by the end of the year following the death of his father. Emerson, an old family friend, died in 1882. His brother Wilkie and friend Turgenev both died in 1883. In 1884, James made another visit to Paris, where he met again with Zola, Daudet, and Goncourt. He had been following the careers of the French "realist" or "naturalist" writers, and was increasingly influenced by them. In 1886, he published The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima , both influenced by
11424-525: Was born at 21 Washington Place (facing Washington Square) in New York City on 15 April 1843. His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr. His father was intelligent and steadfastly congenial. He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent means from his father, an Albany banker and investor. Mary came from a wealthy family long settled in New York City. Her sister Katherine lived with her adult family for an extended period of time. Henry Jr.
11536-525: Was filmed in 1984 by the Merchant Ivory team (director James Ivory , producer Ismail Merchant , writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ) with Christopher Reeve , Vanessa Redgrave and Madeleine Potter in the three central roles. The film earned mixed reviews, with a 87% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes . Vanessa Redgrave's performance received high marks, however, as well as nominations for the 1984 Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Actress . Further,
11648-568: Was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne . In the fall of 1875, he moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris . Aside from two trips to America, he spent the next three decades—the rest of his life—in Europe. In Paris, he met Zola , Daudet , Maupassant , Turgenev and others. He stayed in Paris only a year before settling in London, where he established relationships with Macmillan and other publishers, who paid for serial instalments that they published in book form. The audience for these serialised novels
11760-444: Was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir, A Small Boy and Others, recounting a dream of a Napoleonic image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled. Between 1953 and 1972, Leon Edel wrote a major five-volume biography of James, which used unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained
11872-418: Was largely made up of middle-class women, and James struggled to fashion serious literary work within the strictures imposed by editors' and publishers' notions of what was suitable for young women to read. He lived in rented rooms, but was able to join gentlemen's clubs that had libraries and where he could entertain male friends. He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams and Charles Milnes Gaskell ,
11984-435: Was most engaged with the theatre, James wrote a good deal of theatrical criticism, and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time in London. Leon Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was traumatised by the opening-night uproar that greeted Guy Domville , and that it plunged him into a prolonged depression. The successful later novels, in Edel's view, were
12096-460: Was not well received by contemporary critics, especially in North America. James himself once wrote an observation that The Bostonians had never, "even to my much-disciplined patience, received any sort of justice". James' portrayal of Boston reformers was denounced as inaccurate and unfair, especially because some felt James had satirised actual persons in the novel. Darrel Abel observes that when
12208-553: Was not, however, able to recover any money for the serialization in The Century . When Mississippi lawyer and Confederate Civil War veteran, Basil Ransom, visits his affluent cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston, she reluctantly takes him to a political meeting where Verena Tarrant delivers a feminist speech. Ransom, a strong conservative, is annoyed by the speech but fascinated with the speaker. Olive, who never has set eyes on Verena,
12320-656: Was one of four boys, the others being William , who was one year his senior, and younger brothers Wilkinson ( Wilkie ) and Robertson. His younger sister was Alice . Both of his parents were of Irish and Scottish descent. Before he was a year old, his father sold the house at Washington Place and took the family to Europe, where they lived for a time in a cottage in Windsor Great Park in England. The family returned to New York in 1845, and Henry spent much of his childhood living between his paternal grandmother's home in Albany, and
12432-474: Was particularly interested in what he called the "beautiful and blest nouvelle ", or the longer form of short narrative. Still, he produced a number of very short stories in which he achieved notable compression of sometimes complex subjects. The following narratives are representative of James's achievement in the shorter forms of fiction. At several points in his career, James wrote plays, beginning with one-act plays written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871 and
12544-460: Was to become a celebrated literary academic in adulthood, and painter John La Farge , for whom Henry sat as a subject, and who introduced him to French literature, and in particular, to Balzac . James later called Balzac his "greatest master", and said that he had learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else. In July 1861, Henry and Thomas Sergeant Perry paid a visit to an encampment of wounded and invalid Union soldiers on
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