Part 1: Introduction

Henry James

Henry James and the novel

The 'international theme'

Henry James's method

A note on the text

Part 2: Summaries

A general summary

Detailed summaries

Part 3: Commentary

Structure

Language

Imagery

Sea imagery

Principal characters

Minor characters

Part 4: Hints for study

Topics to select for detailed study

Selected quotations

Arranging material to answer questions

Specimen questions and model answers

Part 5: Suggestions for further reading

The author of these notes

Introduction



Henry James was born in New York City on 15 April 1843, one year

after his brother, William. Their grandfather had made enough money

in business to free his descendants from the need to work for a living.

Their father, Henry James Senior, was a cultured man with a keen

interest in religion and philosophy. He travelled all over Europe, taking

his family with him. The children were educated by private tutors in

New York and given special schooling in England, Switzerland, France,

and Germany.



The eider Henry James wanted his children to be, above all, aware

ofpeople, places, art, and ideas. With this background it is not surpris-

ing that both William and Henry James Junior became students of

perception. Encouraged by their father to value their owh perceptions

of the world, they both spent their lives considering the ways in which

people see things and how they react to what they see. William became

aphilosopher and a pioneer ofpsychology in the United States. Henry

tumed psychology into art in his fiction.



In 1858 the James family returned from Europe to America. Like

William, Henry studied painting briefly and entered the famous Law

School at Harvard University. He left without taking a degree, and

began to write reviews and short stories. In 1875 he went to Paris where

he met Turgenev, the Russian novelist, and came under the influence of

the great French writers ofthe period, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola.

Each ofthese writers had his own distinctive method and style, but they

all believed that the art of fiction was a deeply serious activity whose

purpose was to examine the ways in which people live. This became

James's belief. The seriousness of his approach to the art of fiction is

evident not only in his stories and novels, but also in the many essays

he wrote about other writers and about the form and principles of the

novel.



In 1877 Henry James settled permanently in England. Most ofhis

works are set in Europe and many ofthem develop what became known

as James's 'international theme', that is, they tell stories about Ameri-

cans in Europe or, less often, Europeans in America. The American

(1877) and Daisy Miller (1878) are about young Americans who make

mistakes in France and Italy. In Daisy Miller the mistake is tragic and

the heroine dies. The American girl in The Portrait ofa Lady (1881)

comes to wish for death as an escape from the mistake she makes in

Europe. Instead of allowing Isabel Archer to die, James increases her

awareness oflife: as her perceptions become sharper, her consciousness

expands.



Henry James's career extended from the end of the American Civil

War to the middle of the First World War. His output was vast. In

addition to his twenty-two novels, he wrote over a hundred short

stories, several volumes of essays, plays, books of travel, biography,

autobiography, and thousands of letters. In all this there is no better

place to begin than The Portrait ofa Lady. The novel shows James in

full command ofhis powers, but uses simpler language than later novels

such as The Wings of tbe Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903) in

which he also employs the international theme.



In 1915 Henry James became a British citizeri. He was angry with

America for hesitating to come to Britain's aid during the First World

War, and wished to declare his own feelings for the country he had

adopted as his home. He was awarded the British Order of Merit

shortly before his death on 28 February 1916.



Henry James and the novel



By the time Henry James began to write his early works, American

literature had much to be proud of, especially in the novel. The 'Leather-

stocking' novels (1823-41) ofJames Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) had

created the hunter, Natty Bumppo, whose home was the American

wilderness. Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-64) stories and novels-rThe

Scarlet Letter (1850) chief among them-had dealt with the early

Puritan culture of New England. Herman Melville (1819-91) had

broken all the rules of fiction in Moby Dick (1851), his great epic of

Captain Ahab and the white whale.



These books all contain their own vision of life, their own kind of

truth, but they have one important thing in common: none of them is

realistic. Natty Bumppo is an ideal of freedom; Hawthorne's New

England belongs to the imagination; in Ahab and the whale Melville

created the most powerful symbols in American literature.



As a young writer, James was encouraged by the American novelist

William Dean Howells (1837-1920), best known today for The Rise of

Silas Lapham (1885). Howells was fascinated not by ideals, allegories,

or symbols, but by 'real life', and this became James's passion too.