Epilogue

‘Epilogue’ assesses the legacy of Henry James. James endures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a phenomenon as much as any writer of his time. The persisting attractions of James’s life and works undoubtedly have something to do with their rarity and difficulty. There is also the durability of his themes: the position of women, the multifariousness of human sexuality, and the problem of knowledge. James’s keen awareness of class and money and his understanding of how wealth confers power through social connections and networks have become ever more relevant in today’s era of super capitalism. Yet another source of James’s contemporaneity is his commitment to literary and technological innovation.

Prologue

‘Prologue’ provides a background on Henry James’s writing, the hallmarks of which are aesthetic self-consciousness and a focus on the conventions and etiquette of the social elite. James is considered to be among the greatest English-language novelists. He specialized in profound portraits of human character, the relations between genders, and moral conflicts. He wrote with extraordinary insight about women and girls, and about the power conferred by money and the vulnerability conferred by lacking it.

2. Global apprenticeship

‘Global apprenticeship’ discusses how Henry James pursued a global apprenticeship, during which he produced formidable reviews of European and American writers. He schooled himself deliberately in the methods of an international array of masters, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Ivan Turgenev. James’s early heroines from this apprenticeship period include Eugenia Münster, Daisy Miller, and Catherine Sloper, of, respectively, The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and Washington Square (1880). By making complexly imagined young women the engines of these stories, these narratives show how riveting the question of what the young woman will do, and why, can be.

3. The James brand

‘The James brand’ examines how, during the period when he was introducing his brand to an Anglo-American public, Henry James honed his signature subject: plotting the fates of Americans abroad. If James was not the inventor of the international novel, he was certainly one of its most important proponents and developers. The first of James’s international novels, The American (1877), focuses on the mind of a woman; Portrait of a Lady (1881) reveals it to be an ideal register for the deep psychological transformations that became his trademark. James also wrote a major essay on literary criticism during this period, “The Art of Fiction” (1884).

4. Professional author

‘Professional author’ explores some of Henry James’s most renowned works, published between the late 1880s and the turn of the century. The volume and quality of novels and stories that he produced in this period made his name as a leading Anglo-American author. James’s steady focus on his signature subjects never waned. These include coming of age, gender relations, sexuality, the nature of modernity, the threat of relativism, and the rise of mass culture and the role of art within it. Three important works of this period include The Bostonians (1886), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Awkward Age (1899).

5. Masterpieces

‘Masterpieces’ focuses on three of Henry James’s novels that are generally considered his greatest: The Ambassadors (1902), The Wings of the Dove (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The Ambassadors is a meditation on the nature of ambition, destiny, and what makes a life meaningful. The Wings of the Dove deals with illness and suffering, and the moral conundrum presented by a dying girl possessed of great wealth she cannot enjoy, and her needy friends who seek to inherit it. The Golden Bowl is about the institutions of marriage and family, and how they are disrupted by passion. The chapter also examines James’s travel narrative, The American Scene (1907).

1. Becoming Henry James

‘Becoming Henry James’ presents a biography of Henry James and his family. It also details the start of his writing career that would establish him as among the great fictionalizers of women’s experience and foremost novelists in English. Among the first literary authors to navigate the international publishing scene effectively, James managed to profit from the security of American copyright law and the ambiguity of British law. However, his relationship to the literary marketplace was characteristically ambivalent. What did assist James’s career immensely was the growth of the publishing industry in the post–Civil War period, especially periodical publishing, catalyzed by the expansion and professionalization of advertising.