Chapter 1 - Untimely Deaths and Artful Promise in Henry James’s Post-1890 Writings

Summary

This chapter focuses on examples of Henry James’s post-1890 writings – including Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) – which engage with, or themselves embody, the challenge of commemorating lives cut short prematurely or traumatically. The first half addresses formal and stylistic features and explores how James’s commitment to conserving and commemorating the unspent experiential potential of the dead of the American Civil War manifests within his late aesthetics: informing syntax, notions of character, and the pressure placed on traditional narrative structures. The subsequent sections then trace a competing phenomenon, inspired in part by the author’s meditations on Civil War Monuments: the concern that several of James’s late works (both fictional and non-fictional) display about the wisdom of investing emotionally in the unlived lives of the untimely dead. Together, these sections argue that, during the last twenty-five years of his life, James produced writings at once enthralled by and wary of unfulfilled narrative potential, and attentive to how it might be used to bind epochs together.