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  • The Women: Introduction
  • Susan M. Griffin

This special issue asks us to think about Henry James with women. The contributors draw our attention to some of the many female figures among whom James lived and worked. From the beginning, of course, readers and critics have been drawn to James's female characters. A quick look at the stunning variety, rich psychologies, and vivid presences of, for example, James's "M" heroines—Mary Garland, Maisie Farange, May Bartram, Marie de Vionnet, Maria Gostrey, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver—shows us why (and this is only a partial list). That the two women most central in Henry James's life are Mary James and Minnie Temple has not been regarded as a coincidence by most Jamesians. These figures, how they are represented, and what they represent have always played a central role in James criticism. Henry James's own deep connections and identifications with both his female characters and the women in his life have long been recognized. Over time scholars also showed what female writers learned from Henry James and, occasionally, paid attention to what James learned from women writers. There were those who dismissed James as himself a woman: a sissy, an effeminate writer of society novels. Leon Edel's biography of James, on the other hand, tended to downplay, or, sometimes, as in the case of Edith Wharton, even mock, the women in James's life, a tendency that Edel's edition of the letters evidences as well. First-wave American feminists, focused on the misogyny of the American canon and its making, typically saw James as an at least partial exception.

The essays included here demonstrate how recent archival, biographical, critical, and creative work have shifted and multiplied how we read James with women. In investigating James's epistolary exchanges with his niece, Susan Gunter proposes that Henry and Peggy's relationship is best understood as rhizomic: "non-hierarchical, constantly evolving, interrelated on equal planes." What is striking here is how the figure of the rhizome (borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari) mobilizes our possible conceptions of women and James. We need not reduce, say, Constance Fenimore Woolson to wife manque, frustrated lover, or sister substitute. Instead, we can imagine James and Woolson's relationship as—while certainly circumscribed by personal psychology and societal structures—creative and changing. [End Page 207]

This general openness can been seen in essays that give us both fresh understandings of the familiar—Isabel Archer and Isabella Stewart Gardner, in essays by Sarah Blackwood and Rosella Zorzi—and less expected intimacies—Peggy James and Alice A. Bartlett as introduced by Gunter and Sarah Wadsworth. Blackwood focuses our attention on the fact that Isabel's fine consciousness is emphatically an embodied one. Zorzi plots the balance between intimacy and distance that James maintained in his often ironized letters to Gardner. The Henry James who appears alongside Alice Bartlett, Wadsworth shows us, is the unfamiliar figure of James as equestrian. Clair Hughes attunes us to the nuances of dress—indeed of accessories—that Maisie must learn to read. Meaghan Clarke also historicizes Jamesian fashion but does so by attention to "exhibition culture," the intricate connections among fashion, art, and the female in the late nineteenth century. "The Woman Question" that unsettled the Victorians was often framed in terms of suffrage, an issue that Joanna Gates investigates in James's epistolary relations with Elizabeth Robins, actress, playwright, and feminist activist. Robins as performing woman is also of interest to Gail Marshall as she explores, not James's playwriting, but the domestic theater of his fiction.

Geraldine Murphy and Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck focus specifically on narrative strategies in relation to gender and sexuality. Murphy demonstrates that Vernon Lee writes back to James's "The Aspern Papers" (the germ for which was provided by Lee's brother) with her "Lady Tal" and, in doing so, renders "a defense of women's writing and experience at the turn of the century." Emery-Peck argues that James manipulates the formal techniques of "In the Cage," shifting perspectives between outside and inside the telegraphist's cage and consciousness to "explore the positions of woman as author and woman as reader."

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