Authors: Henry James

By 1864, James was submitting reviews to various publications, and in 1865 he placed his first story. For the next five years, he traveled extensively, spending long periods particularly in Paris and London, where he penetrated the fashionable literary circles and formed friendships with the leading writers and artists of the time. During this time, he wrote sporadically, mostly on a minor scale, though he did manage to achieve the serialized publication of his first novel, Watch and Ward, in 1871. During the next five years, he continued his schedule of travel and socializing, though he gradually began to write more regularly. His literary career properly began in 1875 with the publication of A Passionate Pilgrim, his first significant stories, which included “Madame de Mauves.” The success of this collection seemed to confirm him in his literary vocation, and in the following year he settled permanently in London and began to follow a serious regimen. From then on his output was prodigious.

James’s literary career is usually divided into three phases. The first phase, from 1875 to 1885, really begins with “Madame de Mauves,” in which the naïve innocence of America is juxtaposed against the cynical and jaded experience of Europe, a confrontation often also compounded by the juxtapositions of American money with European decay and American simplicity with European complexity. During this period, James enjoyed the only true popularity he ever encountered in his career, largely because he had fastened on the question of the moment and realized it in fiction—the question of what constituted the American character and how it would interact with the established society of Europe. The American was the first in this series of popular successes; in this work, James caught the popular imagination in an account of a young American hopelessly out of his depth in sophisticated European society. He capitalized on this success in Daisy Miller, in which a spirited American girl defies European conventions, exposes their hypocrisies and repressions, yet dies because she carries her rebellion too far. The masterpiece of this period is The Portrait of a Lady; here James deepens and intensifies the themes, showing that both Europe and America suffer in their repeated failure to reach an accommodation that will fuse the values of both traditions. In this work, James also began to experiment with those techniques of point of view and characterization that ultimately led to a new kind of storytelling.

In his second phase, from 1885 to 1897, James abandoned the treatment of international confrontation to pursue more limited national—that is, distinctly British and American—social and psychological themes. He had also become more interested in technical problems in narrative. During this time, he lost many of his readers, and the major works of this period—The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Tragic Muse—were all financial and critical failures. Yet they define the social ambience that became the context of the modernist movement: Many critics have speculated that the early work of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound originated in scenes that James created in these works. Dismayed by their popular rejection, James decided in 1890 to try the stage as a more appropriate vehicle for his vision, for this was a time of social realism in the theater. Here he failed even more dismally; one of his plays was met with such derision from the audience that the performance could not continue. Probably drawing on these experiences, James composed at this time a series of stories about artists out of touch with their society, the best known of which is “The Real Thing.”

Returning to fiction, James inaugurated his third period, from 1897 to 1916—often called his major phase but also designated by adverse critics as that of James the Old Pretender—with The Spoils of Poynton. Here he introduces drastic experiments in point of view, dramatic presentation of scene, and partial revelation of character, devices which foreshadow Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The other landmarks of this phase are The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl; his most enduring work, the novella The Turn of the Screw, also appeared at this time. These works undeniably represent the most complex development of James’s approach to fiction, and they are by any standard technical marvels. Their influence on the evolution of twentieth century fiction, moreover, was immense. Critical acceptance of these works continues to be divided, however, perhaps in part because James’s technical innovations were already being superseded by those of Joyce. Beyond all doubt, these later works constitute the most advanced reach of James’s art; his style here reaches its most cryptic extreme, becoming almost an end in itself. James has been damned as a “writer’s writer,” but in his art he nevertheless anticipated the most abstract contemporary critical theories.