Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-born British novelist and short story writer admired as the novel’s most celebrated practitioner.
Born in New York City, James relocated to Europe at age 20, settled in England, took infrequent visits to America, and become a British subject in 1915, a year before his death.
James’s father was a wealthy philosopher and theologian, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, who considered the best education was a philosophical and scientific one. Henry and his brother, the future psychologist and philosopher William James, were raised with a broad exposure to civilization and culture.
Henry James was taken abroad before he could even talk. He spent substantial amounts of his childhood overseas and learned with teachers and governesses in London, Paris, Geneva, and Boulogne-Sur-Mer. James’s only exposure to conventional education was his matriculation at the age of 19 at Harvard Law School.
An injury precluded James from participating in the American Civil War. He wrote for over 50 years, creating 20 novels, numerous short stories, 12 plays, and various volumes of travel writing and literary criticism, which he labeled “a supremely beneficent art.”
Scholars categorize James’s literary career into three stages. His early period explored the confrontation between Americans and the delicate and often corrupting effects of European culture. This period produced Roderick Hudson (1876,) The American (1877,) and Daisy Miller (1879,) and peaked with his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (1881.) James’s second phase was a period of experimentation and failed attempts to succeed as a dramatist. He produced The Aspern Papers (1888,) The Turn of the Screw (1898,) and his three greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902,) The Ambassadors (1903,) and The Golden Bowl (1904.) James’s final literary phase started with his first voyage to America in 20 years. His pessimistic assessment The American Scene (1907) laments, “The large and noble sanities that I see around are” converted to “crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry James
The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
—Henry James
Topics: Identity
The fatal futility of Fact.
—Henry James
Topics: Facts
Greville Fane’s French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.
—Henry James
Topics: Mistakes
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
—Henry James
Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
—Henry James
Topics: Tact
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
—Henry James
Topics: Critics, Criticism
He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
—Henry James
Topics: Reading
Of course you’re always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you’ll condemn them all!
—Henry James
Topics: Critics, Criticism
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
—Henry James
Topics: Exile
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
—Henry James
Topics: Trying
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
—Henry James
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy … what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
—Henry James
Topics: Success, Appropriateness, Aptness
True happiness, we are told, consists getting out of one’s self, but the point is not only to get out; you must stay and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.
—Henry James
Topics: Happiness
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
—Henry James
Topics: Travel, Tourism
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
—Henry James
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
—Henry James
Topics: Feminism, Women
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
—Henry James
Topics: Museums
An Englishman is never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
—Henry James
Topics: Britain
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
—Henry James
Topics: Thoughts
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
—Henry James
Topics: Civilization
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.
—Henry James
Topics: Conscience
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
—Henry James
Topics: Simplicity
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life’s underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure. Towards these ends I pledge my life’s work. I will supply the children with tools and knowledge to overcome the obstacles. I will pass on the wisdom of my years and temper it with patience. I shall impact in each child the desire to fulfill his or her dream. I shall teach.
—Henry James
Topics: Teaching
Summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James
Topics: Seasons, Summer
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?
—Henry James
Topics: Life and Living, Life, Happiness
Deep experience is never peaceful.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
I think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth – I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
—Henry James
Topics: Carpe-diem
A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
—Henry James
Topics: Understanding
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