In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Understanding the Family: Jane Maher's Biography of Broken Fortunes by Carol Holly, St. Olaf College What began as a trickle with Gay Wilson AUen's biography of WiUiam James and Leon Edel's successive volumes on Henry has by now become a steady stream of biographical research on the remarkable family engendered by Henry James, Sr., and Mary James. Not only have recent years seen the publication of two books on Alice James—Jean Strouse's and Ruth Bernard YeazeU's—but WUliam's life and work have come under the scrutiny of two new biographers as weU (Feinstein, Myers). Leon Edel has compressed and revised his fivevolume biography of Henry James for publication both at home and abroad, and, with Growing Up in the James Family, Katherine Weissbourd has come out with the first book-length study of Henry James, Sr., to appear in many years.1 As if to anticipate this impressive flood of publications, Vintage reissued in paperback F. O. Mattiiiessen's edition of the selective writings of Henry Sr., WiUiam, Henry Jr., and Alice—The James Family—and a recent issue of The Psychohistory Review dedicated to psychological studies of the Jameses includes discussion not only of these better known members of the famUy but of mother Mary James as weU. Now, lest no member of the family be overlooked, Jane Maher's Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986;. 221 pp.; $22.50) asks us to consider as weU the lives of the lesser known siblings, the younger brothers of WiUiam and Henry: Garth Wilkinson (1845-1883) and Robertson (1846-1910). We remember Wilkie and Bob as the brothers who, having fought bravely in the Civil War and failing tiiereafter to settle into vocations, led lives in striking contrast to their distinguished elder brothers.2 But why write a book about men who, without these brothers, would have been lost to history altogether? When Anna Robeson Burr included Wilkie and Bob in a sketch of the James famüy, she was paid by Bob's daughter, Mary James Vaux, to rescue the unknown brothers from the neglect they had suffered at the hands of previous biographers. When F. O. Matthiessen included a brief selection of the brothers' letters in The James Family, he was attempting to provide as complete a portrait of this "family of minds" as possible (v). But the bulk of the book went to the minds that mattered most, not to Wilkie and Bob. When in Becoming William James Howard 210 The Henry James Review Feinstein included two weU-researched chapters on Wilkie, Bob, and Alice, he was primarily concerned with creating a context for WiUiam's vocational stuggles. But Maher has neither grievances to redress nor commitment to a famous brother to justify a subsidiary interest in the failed and obscure. So she puts her money on the family as a whole. The "story of the lives of Wilkie and Bob," she explains in her introduction, "contribute^] to a better understanding of one of America's most extraordinary families. To understand any one member of the James family, one must be aware of the forces, both supportive and competitive, which were being generated by every other member" (xii). I find nothing to quarrel with in this initial statement of intent. Maher is right to insist that insight into the lives of Wilkie and Bob depends on our understanding of other members of the family; she is correct to suggest that an understanding of Wilkie and Bob wiU in tum iUuminate family "forces" or dynamics. She is even right to assume that it is largely to gain "a better understanding of one of America's most extraordinary families" tiiat we wish to read about Wilkie and Bob at aU. But by suggesting that she wiU provide this understanding, Maher unfortunately promises more than she delivers. Though strong on information, her biography is weak on interpretation and thus fails to iUuminate as fuUy as it might the family forces it seeks to understand. Let us begin our consideration of Maher's discussion of the family by looking first at the...

pdf

Share