17 - Henry James

Summary

Henry James (1843-1916) was, like Joseph Conrad, an English novelist by choice and naturalisation rather than by birth. Born in New York, he settled in England in December 1876 and became a British citizen in 1915, shortly before his death. But if James seemed to turn his back on his native America, he never ceased to keep an analytical eye on it. From his first acknowledged novel, Roderick Hudson (1875) - an earlier novel, Watch and Ward, was disowned - to his last completed novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), James sustained a complex dialogue between America and Europe, renegotiating repeatedly a relation capable of apparently infinite variation. Perhaps no major novelist is more prone to reinterpretation than Henry James: his works are constantly being mined for meanings buried or assumed to be buried under their apparently placid surfaces. This may be because the relatively overt moral purpose as manifested variously in, for instance, the novels of Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, shades off, in James, into something less determinate, more negotiable. Combining uniquely the influence of his compatriot Nathaniel Hawthorne and the tradition of English realism with the example of such French writers as Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant, James can now be seen as an early modernist in his experimentation with his chosen form, favouring a partial perspective rather than omniscience as narrative medium, and generating implications and suggestions rather than packaged meanings.