Henry James Senior

A biography of the passionate, contradictory father of William, Henry and Alice James. The author counters the popular view - a view that the James family perpetuated - that Henry James Sr was a benignant man who devoted himself to the good of his children, preached tolerance, and practised self-effacement. Instead, he shows us a man who developed a convoluted personal philosophy to account for his own feelings of pain and guilt, his conviction of his essential sinfulness and capacity for evil, and his fragile sense of self. The work sets Henry James Sr in the broader intellectual and cultural context of his age. As well as throwing light on the development of James's two sons, it is also a study of how families work.

Containing letters written between October 3, 1878, and August 30, 1879, this volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James reveals Henry James establishing control of his writing career and finding confidence in himself not only as a professional author on both sides of the Atlantic but also as an important social figure in London. In this volume of 114 letters, of which 58 are published for the first time, we see James learning to negotiate, pitting one publisher against another, and working to secure simultaneous publication in the United States and England. He establishes a working relationship with Frederick Macmillan and with the Macmillan publishing house, cultivates reviewers, basks in the success—and notoriety—of his novella Daisy Miller, and visits Alfred Tennyson and George Eliot, among others. James also produces essays on political subjects and continues to publish reviews and travel essays. Perhaps most important, James negotiates terms for and begins planning The Portrait of a Lady.

Containing letters written between September 2, 1879, and May 14, 1880, this second volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880 documents the full establishment of Henry James as a professional writer and critic on both sides of the Atlantic, as James publishes the novel Confidence and the literary biography Hawthorne and begins work on Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady. James also visits Paris, Florence, Rome, and Naples; begins his friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson; and deepens his attachment to London and to his friends and acquaintances there.

This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family.

Prof. William James has collected in this volume some writings of his father, which had not before seen the light in book form. The only properly "literary" portion is the "Personal Recollections of Carlyle," a paper surely unique in all the mass of matter poured out since the death of that "literary desperado," as this modern mystic humorously entitles him. The portrait of Mr. Emerson, in one of the fifteen chapters loosely grouped under the heading "Spiritual Creation," is, however, just as little to be matched: "The only thing that I was sure of [concerning Emerson] being that he, like Christ, was somehow divinely begotten. He seemed to me unmistakably virgin-born whenever I looked at him, and reminded me of nothing so much as of those persons dear to Christ's heart who should come after him, professing no allegiance to him, having never heard his name pronounced, and yet perfectly fulfilling his will.... He was fundamentally treacherous to civilization, without being at all aware himself of the fact.... He had no conscience, in fact.... This was Emerson's incontestable virtue to every one who appreciated him: that he recognized no God outside of himself and his interlocutor, and recognized him there only as the liaison between the two, taking care that all their intercourse should be holy with a holiness undreamed of before by man or angel." Some fragmentary chapters of an autobiography complete the list of contents, to which Prof. James has prefixed an admirable Introduction. This will probably give most readers a far better idea of Henry James' system of thought than all the latter's own writings. Those who had but a very slight acquaintance with these recognized in Mr. James one of the rarest minds of the age, with incomparable power of literary expression. If only these powers had labored to set forth anything short of the inexpressible! But Mr. James was a thorough mystic, possessed with an exceeding sense of sin, annihilating the human in the divine, and ever full of scorn for morals as a source of possible salvation. "He first and last and always made moralism the target of his hottest attack, and pitted religion and it against each other as enemies, of whom one must die utterly, if the other is to live in genuine form. The accord of moralism and religion is superficial, their discord radical." How these things can so be to Prof. James, as to his father, we cannot here explain. There can be little doubt that the thoughtful perusal of this volume will at least make such words seem much more reasonable to even the most earnest moralists; for Mr. James was indeed "one member of that band of saints and mystics, whose rare privilege it has been, by the mere example and recital of their own bosom experience, to prevent religion from becoming a fossil conventionalism, and to keep it forever alive." Possibly, no readers will find more profit in the mystical thought of these pages than those who have had to preserve morality itself from neglect by the religious! -The Unitarian Review, Volume 23

Henry James, OM (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an American author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

Publisher description

After a childhood divided between America and Europe, Henry James settled with his family in New England, first in what he regarded as an outpost of Europe, Newport, and later in Cambridge. The family letters (the initial inspiration for this autobiographical enterprise), many of which recount the early career of William James at Harvard and in Germany, also reveal Henry James Sr.’s views on the intellectual, philosophical, and social issues of the time. Henry Jr., aspiring to be "just literary," acknowledges his indebtedness to the widely cultured artist John La Farge, whose friendship he enjoyed during adolescence. The Civil War is recorded through the letters of his younger brother, Wilky, while Henry recalls a Whitmanesque longing for the Union soldiers he met and talked to. The death of a beloved cousin, Mary Temple, who would become the inspiration for some of his greatest fictional heroines, is documented through the passionate, questioning letters she wrote in her final year of life. In The Middle Years James, newly resident in London, gives his impressions of some of the literary "lions" of the time, most notably George Eliot and Tennyson. This first fully annotated critical edition of Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years both offers the reader extensive support in appreciating the demands of James’s late prose and illuminates the context in which one of literature’s most influential figures developed a characteristic voice.