Henry James: The Middle Years, 1881-95

by Leon Edel

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380396696
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Consummate word artist

Of course this book is both magnificent and famous. Leon Edel devoted the better part of his scholarly life to the task of writing the biography of Henry James. James lived for seventy-three years and wrote for fifty of them. Edel writes that the biographical process is appealing. Henry James's father was a student of Swedenborg. He was born in 1843. His father died in 1882. His primary school in Albany is described in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. By nine or ten he was an inveterate theater-goer. School was present in his life with more regularity than church. Henry James, Senior feared pedantry and rigidity. Henry's childhood was itinerant. When Henry James was writing THE BOSTONIANS he had before him the circumstances of his sister, Alice. PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA may have been loosely written because it reflected his distraction and fatigue at that time. In THE PRINCESS most of the action took place on Sundays or in the evening when impoverished Londoners had their abbreviated hours of leisure. The hero of the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, is another version of the artist manque depicted ten years earlier in RODERICK HUDSON. Both Roderick and Hyacinth, in their dividedness committed acts of self-destruction. Jasmes had known radicals from childhood. The politics are naive. The workers of the time were naive. James felt he was aristocrat by birth who had to labor for his bread. Constance Fenimore Wooson was James's excellent friend. Her grand-uncle was James Fenimore Cooper. Francis Boott and Lizzie Boott, father and daughter, were other dear expatriate friends of Henry James. Lizzie Boott, after six years of indecision, married Frank Duveneck, a painter from Cincinnati. Duveneck had married an heiress. Lizzie was forty years old. Years later he recreated the psychological situation in THE GOLDEN BOWL. Fenimore, his name for Constance Fenimore Woolson, was his landlady in Florence. In the winter of 1887 he let his sister Alice move to his lodgings in London. He described Florentine society as polyglot. In his 'Italian phase' James wrote between THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA and THE TRAGIC MUSE, eight or ten tales and a short novel. In THE ASPERN PAPERS James attempted to recapture the visitable past, that is to say the generation still within reach of memory. The extinction of the line between public and private was treated by James in THE REVERBERATOR. Lizzie Boott Duveneck died at age forty two leaving behind her husband, her father, and her child.