Henry James

After 20 years of writing the Henry James chapter, I am happy to read new work challenging the conventional wisdom of our interpretive community. A revealing volume of the Complete Letters shows that his psychological expatriation from the United States occurred upon the deaths of his parents in 1882, more than three decades before his legal adoption of British citizenship. Michael Anesko's Generous Mistakes corrects the errors of those regarding James as a demanding—and daunting—perfectionist; on the contrary, his social and professional experience shaped his conviction that miscommunication is inevitable. Another thought-provoking book, Oliver Herford's study of James's nonfiction, affirms his respect for the factual basis of history in the face of postmodern skepticism. But the author's fiction still poses conundrums for interpreters: "The Beast in the Jungle," once regarded by some as either a feminist or a homosocial fable, now rivals The Turn of the Screw as a topic of endless debate. In the Henry James Review special issue "Commemorating Henry James" (38, iii), editor Susan M. Griffin observes in her preface that criticism is "not a matter of honoring a sealed and static past but of robust, ongoing engagement." This principle applies not only to a number of articles and essays but also to John Banville's intriguing novel Mrs. Osmond.

i Letters and Editions

The latest volume of the author's correspondence, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1880–1883: Volume 2, ed. Anesko and Greg W. Zacharias, with Katie Sommer (Nebraska), includes 178 letters, 98 published for the first time. Many of these are brief business and social notes, the dates and contexts of which have been painstakingly reconstructed by the editors. The dominant theme of those written during James's lengthy American sojourn (October 1881–May 1882) is his repeated lament that he is "homesick" for England, along with his growing self-identification as a Londoner. "I am desperately homesick here [in New York City], & I am not homesick in London," he wrote Frederick Macmillan, his British publisher. "The natural inference would seem to be that London is my home." Another implication is that his American travels left him somewhat alienated and (as he confessed to Grace Norton) "wofully [sic] & wickedly bored!" He conceded that Washington, D.C., had "a great deal of charm" but called the Capitol "repulsive" and denigrated the city's black residents in racist terms that may shock admirers who exaggerate his importance as a pioneer of multiculturalism. In the realm of literature he applauded Sarah Orne Jewett's Deephaven ("a little masterpiece") and granted that W. D. Howells's A Modern Instance projected "an extraordinary reality," but he clearly distinguished himself from writers who found "[their] native land more than sufficient for literary purposes."

The newest volume of the Cambridge edition of James's fiction (a project described in AmLS 2015, p. 77) is The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1902–1910, ed. N. H. Reeve—a collection of ten stories from "The Birthplace" through "A Round of Visits." As Reeve notes in the introduction (pp. xxviii–civ), these tales are marked by their comparatively "aggressive tone," resulting from James's impatience with "a vacuously narcissistic society," his awareness of personal betrayals, and his own struggles with the word limits imposed by the magazines on which he depended for his income. There follows a detailed account of the stories' genesis, composition, publication history, and reception, documented by numerous primary sources—notably the author's correspondence with his "agent-man" J. B. Pinker, and contemporary reviews of the books in which the tales were included (The Better Sort, Julia Bride, and The Finer Grain). Reeve also supplies a brief textual introduction, a detailed chronology of composition and production, and an extended bibliography.

ii Sources, Influences, Parallel Studies, and Adaptations

Sheila Liming's "An Impossible Woman: Henry James and the Mysterious Case of Anne Moncure Crane" (ALR 49: 95–113) identifies James as the author not only of a condescending review of Crane's novel Emily Chester (1864) but also of a strangely hostile obituary upon her death in 1873. Nonetheless, Crane's narrative...