“A Brief, Interesting Life of Henry James”

Much has been written on difficulty in the work of Henry James. Whereas considerations of James’s difficulty tend to focus on the dense, indirect style of his later novels, a less commented on but perhaps more prohibitive difficulty may be noted in the sheer amount of work confronting interested readers. Accounting for the volume of James’s primary work is more suitable to the digital language of storage than the [End Page E-3] analog methods of page numbers or shelf space. The Delphi Classics Complete Works of Henry James ebook accounts for a massive (by electronic document standards) 31,825 kilobytes of data, which is only a fraction of the size of secondary criticism and the plethora of biographies, ranging from the multi-volumed to well-researched fictionalizations, written on James. In an irony that would have been familiar to James, the very wealth and nuance of James’s work and amount of scholarship on that work, which together form one of the richest literary archives ever created, an archive that seems to democratically provide and welcome a James for and from any perspective, creates a barrier that can discourage just as easily as it invites new voices.

There’s something very welcome, then, about a biography that places James’s death a mere hundred and fourteen pages after his birth, rather than the customary handful of intervening volumes. Hazel Hutchison’s entry to the Hesperus Press Brief Lives series serves as an accessible entry point, a warm invitation, really, into the world of Henry James. What makes Brief Lives: Henry James such a satisfying introduction to James is its impressive ability to both stand on its own as an account of James’s life and literary development while at the same time making it painless for interested readers to make a second step into the literature.

Brief Lives unfolds at a healthy clip, covering about a decade of James’s life in each of its eight chapters that are ten to twenty pages in length. Some awkwardness arises from the shift in pacing from the chapters that describe James’s life before and after his career as a writer and the more analytic chapters that focus on his major works. The breathless pace of the analytic chapters, especially the portions that are not concerned with James’s literary output, makes them often content to note where James was and who was nearby—for example, “Rye, however, had literary attractions of its own. Stephen Crane, Lucy Clifford, and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) all lived nearby … Joseph Conrad, G. K. Chesterson, H. G. Wells and later Rudyard Kipling all also spent time in the area” (97). While this strategy is by and large serviceable, it can lead to awkward juxtapositions, such as a gushing, longish treatment of The Portrait of a Lady almost immediately followed by a shorter, more matter-of-fact description of the death of James’s parents. This brusque treatment strains the rather laconic, adjectival description of James’s loss, here simply noted as “a miserable Christmas,” and makes Henry’s note to William—“[t]hank God we haven’t another parent to lose”—a touch more icy than either author may have meant (62). While this flattened plane of pathos and analysis seems a curious choice for a book written with a broader audience in mind, Hutchison’s prose maintains an affective vibrancy through her successful use of humor. Hutchison manages to find space for some favorite anecdotes about James, including cru-el cousin Henry chastising his young cousins for their flat, American vowels, and James dashing behind a dyke to avoid talking to the overbearing Ford Madox Ford. Hutchison also provides wry commentary on the James family’s eccentricities: Henry Senior’s “remarkable lapse of memory” (20) in praising and returning his children to the European education he had rejected only a year previously, or that “It seems not to have occurred to anyone that the improvement of [Alice’s] health” during her first European tour had less to...