Henry James
by Leon Edel
Summary
Leon Edel's biography, ultimately five volumes long, follows Henry James across the decades from his 1843 birth at Washington Place in Manhattan, into a family whose wealth let his philosopher father drag the children through repeated stretches of European schooling, and into the shadow of his older brother William, who would become a famous philosopher and psychologist in his own right. The two middle volumes, The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, which together won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize, cover James's life from 1870 to 1895, the years in which he settled permanently in Europe, moving to Paris's Latin Quarter in 1875 and then to London the following year, and in which he wrote the novels that made his reputation, Roderick Hudson, The American, the internationally popular novella Daisy Miller, and his first acknowledged masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881.
Edel follows James through the deaths that reshaped his 1880s, his mother in January 1882 and his father later that same year, his brother Garth Wilkinson James and his old friend Ivan Turgenev both in 1883, and the suicide of the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson in 1894, a loss Edel treats as one of the deepest of James's life. The volumes follow him through the mixed reception of The Bostonians and The Aspern Papers, and close on the edge of the disastrous 1895 opening night of his play Guy Domville, whose booing crowd sent James back to fiction rather than the stage. Edel had rare access to the James family's own letters and papers at Harvard, and he uses that access to argue for a man whose public reticence, his own description of himself as a lifelong bachelor, concealed intense, unresolved attachments that never resolved into the marriage his family kept expecting.
Later scholars, among them biographer Sheldon Novick, have challenged parts of Edel's interpretation, arguing that his emphasis on James's celibacy undersold correspondence, including letters to the Russian painter Paul Zhukovski, that Edel treated as peripheral, a disagreement that has continued to shape how James's biographers read his private life.
Historical Context & Significance
J. B. Lippincott published the five volumes of Edel's Henry James between 1953 and 1972, and the second and third, published together in 1962, won both the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 1963 National Book Award for Nonfiction, an unusual double recognition for a single stage of a longer project. Edel had begun the biography a decade earlier and would not finish the fifth and final volume, The Master, until 1972, making the whole undertaking one of the longest sustained literary biographies of its era.
The completed work established Edel as, in the description later used by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the foremost twentieth century authority on James's life, and it remained the standard biography for decades, even as later biographers used newly available letters to revisit the private life Edel had described with more caution than his sources, in hindsight, may have warranted.