This early work by Henry James was originally published in 1884 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. One of thirteen children, James had an unorthodox early education, switching between schools, private tutors and private reading.. James published his first story, 'A Tragedy of Error', in the Continental Monthly in 1864, when he was twenty years old. In 1876, he emigrated to London, where he remained for the vast majority of the rest of his life, becoming a British citizen in 1915. From this point on, he was a hugely prolific author, eventually producing twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories and novellas, as well as literary criticism, plays and travelogues. Amongst James's most famous works are The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), The Bostonians (1886), and one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, The Turn of the Screw (1898). We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. The nine tales in this volume, published between 1884 and 1888, include 'The Aspern Papers', set in Venice and featuring a devious scholar attempting to steal the letters of an American poet from his former lover, and 'The Liar,' on the world of painters and their models. These tales exemplify James's continuing interest in the art of short fiction during a period which saw him responding to the stimulations of French naturalism and successfully reworking the international theme that had made him famous at the end of the 1870s. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand the tales' historical, cultural and literary references.
Discover anew the life and influence of Henry James, part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies series. In The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, Peter Collister, an established critic and authority on Henry James, offers an original and fully documented account of one of America’s finest writers, who was both a creative practitioner and theorist of the novel. In this volume, James’s life in all its personal and cultural richness is examined alongside a detailed scrutiny of his fiction, essays, biographies, autobiographies, travel writing, plays and reviews. James was a dedicated and brilliant letter-writer and his biographer make judicious use of this material, some of it previously unpublished, evoking in the novelist’s own words the society within which he moved and worked. His gift for friendship, often resulting in close relationships with both men and women, are sensitively explored. Near the beginning of his long and highly productive life, James left America to immerse himself in European culture and history – a necessity, he felt, for the developing artist. In an ironic symmetry he witnessed in his youth the effects of the American Civil War and in his last days, finally becoming a British citizen, despaired at the unfolding tragedy of the Great War in Europe. Sustained, nevertheless, by his own creative energy, he never ceased to believe in the capacity of the arts to enhance and give significance to life. Provides well-informed accounts of Henry James’s youth in New York City, his unconventional education, his extensive travel in Europe, his eventual assimilation into British society, his development as a writer and his personal relationships as a single man. Features discussions of James’s major works in a variety of genres from an assured theoretical and historical perspective. Assesses James’s developing quest for dramatic form in his fiction – the ‘scenic art’ – as well as his critical writing which was to have a lasting influence on the literature and aesthetic values of the twentieth century. Discusses his achieved aspiration to be ‘just literary’, to become what he called that ‘queer monster’, an artist. Charts James’s lifelong interest in art and theatre. An incisive discussion of the life of an author of major stature, The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography offers a refreshingly lucid and human account of a novelist and his often challenging, but rewarding, writing. Peter Collister, a former college Assistant Principal, has published many essays in Europe and America on a range of nineteenth-century British and French authors. He is the author of Writing the Self: Henry James and America and later edited for the university presses of Cambridge and Virginia the award-winning volumes: The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, James's autobiographical writings, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, as well as The American Scene.
William and Georgina Cowper-Temple were significant figures in nineteenth-century Britain. William Cowper-Temple, later Lord Mount Temple, was private secretary to one Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, and minister in the government of Lord Palmerston. He sought to improve the nation's health and rebuild London, and famously amended the Education Act in 1870. His charismatic wife, Georgina, was also champion of diverse social and moral reforms, and friend to such worthies as John Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frances Power Cobbe and Mrs Oscar Wilde. In the first full-length biography of this distinguished couple, James Gregory explores the Cowper-Temples' roles within Whig-Liberalism, philanthropy and social reform, and provides a fascinating insight into the private lives of two aristocrats dedicated to using their powers of influence to alleviate problems in Victorian society.
DIVA stunning biography of the magisterial author behind The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors/divDIV Henry James is an absorbing portrait of one of the most complex and influential nineteenth-century American writers. Fred Kaplan examines James’s brilliant and troubled family—from his brother, a famous psychologist, to his sister, who fought with mental illness—and charts its influence on the development of the artist and his work. The biography includes a fascinating account of James’s life as an American expatriate in Europe, and his friendships with Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad. Compressing a wealth of research into one engrossing and richly detailed volume, Henry James is a compelling exploration of its subject./div
Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.
John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 - Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain's most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds's vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself—and of what it means to live in it.
Legend has tended to preserve Henry James as "The Master" that Joseph Conrad called him, a rather long-winded Olympian given to great utterances on the art of fiction and the writing of profound psychological studies. The real-life figure revealed in these letters is more terse, and even astringent, a professional writer, an eager observer of life, a man who delighted in meeting people and who made an art of friendship, but who did not hesitate to descend into the marketplace of letters and get the best possible price for his wares.Leon Edel designed this selection to show the kinds of letters James wrote--to his family, his contemporaries, to would-be writers--letters injected with irony and obdurate truth. Here are letters to Conrad, Wells, Galsworthy, Henry Adams, Howells, Edith Wharton, Fanny Kemble--to great Victorians as well as those who bridged that era and the modern one.
