Eavesdropping on Henry James: Reading Gender in the Correspondence of William and Henry

Adopting feminist approaches to rhetorical theory and literary history, this essay analyzes variations in tone and resonance in a sequence of extracts from early letters between William and Henry James that focus on gender. The essay shows how "eavesdropping," a rhetorical tactic articulated by Krista Ratcliffe in Rhetorical Listening (2005), can help locate shifts in the way Henry James thought about, wrote about, and related to women through his long literary apprenticeship. It argues that learning to listen to women was as crucial to his education as a novelist as the reading, reviewing, and sightseeing he documented in public writing.