An American novelist who moved to England, Henry James was the author of The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl and Washington Square. James was born in New York in 1843, the son of a philosopher. The family settled in New England and he was regularly published in The Atlantic Monthly, edited by his friend and mentor William Dean Howells and together they introduced the era of American “realism.” He lived in Boston and New York before concluding that he could write better and live more cheaply overseas. James lived and worked in Paris for a short time but felt he would always be an outsider there so moved to London. Here enjoyed a vast social life and was an immensely popular figure inVictorian society, dining out and staying at the great country houses, associating with Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning among others. After a prolific career he retired to Rye in Sussex and even visited the United States after an absence of 20 years. In response to this he wrote The American Scene (1907), disturbed by the pollution, urban sprawl and materialism of American life. He died in 1916 having become a British subject and received the Order of Merit the previous year.
Inspired by his experiences of Paris, The American (1877) is about a sincere American millionaire and the haughty and scheming French aristocratic family he attempts to marry into. In Paris he had met Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev and others of the literary elite and learnt that character was more important than plot. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the culmination of his studies of “the American girl”, a brash yet innocent American pitted against the decadence of Europe and refusing to be objectified or crushed by its customs. It is a study of the American character, egotistical yet liberated. After his first play was booed off the stage, James was crushed and dramatically changed his storytelling. He deliberately alternated between “picture” and drama, adhered to a single vision of the character and thus sometimes withholding information from the reader. He transferred his theme of innocence corrupted to that of children and their education, most famously in What Maisie Knew (1897) and the ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898).
In his final or “major” phase he moved towards intense character studies about small groups placed in tense circumstances. His prose style became more allusive, symbolic and dense. The Ambassadors (1903) is a comedy of manners about an American sent to Paris to bring home an errant young man but is in turn captivated. It contrasts European sophistication with American moral rigidity. The Wings of the Dove (1902) is about a terminally ill heiress married for her money, a brutal subject he endows with dignity. James also wrote popular short stories, critiques of other writers ,travel tales and created the myth of the American abroad. His essential subject remained of a naive independent American confronting the worldliness and corruption of the European aristocratic culture. In rendering so keenly the inner life of a character, he anticipated modernism and ‘stream-of-consciousness' techniques.