Containing letters written between September 2, 1879, and May 14, 1880, this second volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880 documents the full establishment of Henry James as a professional writer and critic on both sides of the Atlantic, as James publishes the novel Confidence and the literary biography Hawthorne and begins work on Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady. James also visits Paris, Florence, Rome, and Naples; begins his friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson; and deepens his attachment to London and to his friends and acquaintances there.
Containing letters written between October 3, 1878, and August 30, 1879, this volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James reveals Henry James establishing control of his writing career and finding confidence in himself not only as a professional author on both sides of the Atlantic but also as an important social figure in London. In this volume of 114 letters, of which 58 are published for the first time, we see James learning to negotiate, pitting one publisher against another, and working to secure simultaneous publication in the United States and England. He establishes a working relationship with Frederick Macmillan and with the Macmillan publishing house, cultivates reviewers, basks in the success—and notoriety—of his novella Daisy Miller, and visits Alfred Tennyson and George Eliot, among others. James also produces essays on political subjects and continues to publish reviews and travel essays. Perhaps most important, James negotiates terms for and begins planning The Portrait of a Lady.
This seventeenth installment in the complete collection of Henry James's known and extant letters records James's ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, engage timely political and economic issues, and maximize his income.
This volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883–1884 includes 125 letters, of which 72 are published for the first time, written from January 29, 1884, to November 9, 1884. The letters mark Henry James’s confidence and achievements as an internationally important professional writer, including his participation in conceiving and carrying out with editors and publishers complicated plans to distribute his work and maximize his income. James details his work on mid-career novels The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima as well as work on a number of tales that would help to define his career. This volume concludes with James’s anticipation of the arrival in England from the United States of his sister, Alice, who would never again return to her homeland.
This fifteenth installment in the complete collection of Henry James’s more than ten thousand letters records James’s ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, and engage timely political and economic issues.
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: A Finer Art, by Susan M. Griffin -- Symbols and Abbreviations -- Chronology -- Errata -- 1880 -- June -- July -- August -- September -- October -- November -- December -- 1881 -- January -- February -- March -- April -- May/June -- July -- August -- September -- October -- Biographical Register -- General Editors' Note -- Works Cited -- Index
Recipient of the Approved Edition seal from the Modern Language Association's committee on scholarly editions This volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1880-1883 includes 178 letters, 98 of which are published for the first time, written from November 1, 1881, to January 1, 1883. The letters record Henry James's establishment as one of the preeminent professional writers in Britain and the United States and follow James's return journeys to the United States following the deaths of his parents. This volume concludes with James's assumption of his role as the executor of his father's will and thus the de facto head of the family.
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.
This is the first scholarly edition of an important group of critical writings by Henry James, the Prefaces to his New York Edition (1907–9). It will be of value to James scholars and to scholars and advanced students of 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature and book history.
"Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" —Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James’s conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature. Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson’s dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family’s ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father’s death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward. Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil–War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. After her mother’s death, Woolson, with help from her sister, moved to Europe where expenses were lower, living mostly in England and Italy and spending several months in Egypt. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton’s work of the next generation. In this rich biography, Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson’s character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today.
