18 - Henry James (1843–1916): Henry James's Europe

Summary

The inclusion in a survey of European novelists of Henry James, born in New York, and who did not take British nationality until 1915, just a few months before his death, requires some explanation. The fact that he spent only the first year of his forty-one-year permanent, self-imposed exile from the United States in Continental Europe (in Paris), retreating from there to England, would perhaps seem to qualify his grounds for inclusion still further. However, this mere analysis of dates conceals a literary career which James himself always, from the earliest years, conceived in terms arguably more European than that of any other major practitioner of the novel in English in his period.

James was brought to Europe in infancy by his parents, in the 1840s, and then more significantly, for a three-year period, 1855–8, at the beginning of his teens, residing variously in Paris, Boulogne and Geneva, while he returned in 1859 and attended the École Toepffer as well as studying German in Bonn. In the early 1870s (1869–73) he travelled on the Continent, chiefly in Italy rather than France, owing to the Franco-Prussian War waged in this period. In 1875, coming to Europe for the first time unaccompanied as an adult, he endeavoured to settle in Paris, spending a year there until 1876 when, suffering some setbacks in his project to establish himself as a writer of ‘letters home’ reporting for an American journal on the Parisian scene, he moved on to London, where his career was to become established for the remainder of his life.