Henry James’s Hawthorne

Henry James’s book on Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the most important early works of criticism on an American writer. Commentators on the study have been inclined to think that James condescended to Hawthorne’s writing by seeing it as infused with playful fancy rather than with tragic seriousness. This article shows how earlier criticism on Hawthorne by Leslie Stephen and George Parsons Lathrop influenced James’s book. It argues that James reworked existing critical commonplaces to help him to articulate his sense of Hawthorne’s achievements as an American writer; and concludes that the generosity of this overlooked feature of Hawthorne is characteristic of James’s most attractive critical writing.