Henry James, Vol. II: The Conquest of London and Vol. III: The Middle Years
by Leon Edel
Summary
These are the second and third volumes of Leon Edel's five volume life of Henry James, the biography that occupied Edel for more than twenty years and set the standard against which literary biography is still measured. The Conquest of London and The Middle Years carry James from his arrival in Europe in the 1870s as an ambitious young American through his establishment in London, the decades in which he wrote Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Princess Casamassima and made himself the preeminent Anglo American novelist of his age. Edel had privileged access to the James family papers, and he used them with a method then new to biography: informed by psychoanalysis, he reads the life through its inner patterns, the ambivalence toward America, the flight from marriage, the rivalries lightly buried in the fiction, without ever reducing the novels to symptoms. The portrait that emerges is of a man who chose art over almost everything else and built a life exactly shaped to produce it: the London dinners where he gathered material, the friendships with Turgenev and Stevenson, the deaths of his sister Alice and of Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose ambiguous place in James's life Edel handles with famous delicacy. The two volumes together won both the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1963, the year's double crown. Later scholars have quarreled with Edel's guardianship of the archive and his conclusions about James's inner life, but every subsequent James biography is a response to this one.
Historical Context & Significance
Edel published the five volumes between 1953 and 1972, and the 1963 double award for the middle volumes marked the project's public triumph at the height of James's postwar revival, when the novelist dismissed at his death as mandarin had become the center of the American graduate curriculum. Edel, a McGill trained scholar who had begun studying James in the 1920s, held near exclusive rights to the family papers, an arrangement that gave the biography its authority and drew later criticism as the archive opened. He condensed the work into a single volume in 1985, its psychological method influenced a generation of literary biographers, and the argument over how he used his monopoly of the sources is now part of how biography itself gets taught.