James, Henry 1843-1916
US novelist

He was born in New York City, of Irish and Scottish stock. Until his father's death he was known as Henry James, Junior. His father, Henry James (1811-82), was a well-known theological writer and lecturer, and an exponent of Emanuel Swedenborg and Sandemanism. After a roving youth in the USA and Europe (where he met Ivan Turgenev and Gustave Flaubert), and desultory law studies at Harvard, he began in 1865 to produce brilliant literary reviews and short stories. His work as a novelist falls into three periods. To the first, in which he is mainly concerned with the 'international situation', the impact of US life on the older European civilization, belong Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), Washington Square (1880), Portrait of a Lady (1881), Princess Casamassima (1886), in which he probes the shadier aspects of European political life, and finally The Bostonians (1886). From 1876 he made his home in England, chiefly in London and at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, where he struck up an oddly contrasted friendship with the science fiction pioneer and self-conscious reformer of mankind, H G Wells, a friendship which lasted until the latter's savage attack on the Jamesian ethos in the novel Boon (1915). His second period, devoted to purely English subjects, comprises The Tragic Muse (1890), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899). James reverts to Anglo-American attitudes in his last period, which includes The Wings of a Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), possibly his masterpiece, The Golden Bowl (1904) and two unfinished novels. Collections of his characteristic 'long short stories' include Terminations (1895), The Two Magics (1898) and The Altar of the Dead (1909). His well known ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, was published in 1898. The acknowledged master of the psychological novel, which has profoundly influenced the 20th-century literary scene, he sacrifices plot in the interests of minute delineation of character. Many seemingly insignificant incidents, however, subtly contribute allegorically or metaphorically to the author's intentions. He became a British subject (1915) and shortly before his death was appointed to the Order of Merit. He also wrote critical studies such as French Poets and Novelists (1878), and the essay 'On the Art of Fiction' (1884), travel sketches such as The American Scene (1906) and three volumes of memoirs, A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and a Brother (1914) and the unfinished The Middle Years (1917). He was the brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James.

Bibliography: L Edel, Henry James (5 vols, 1953-72); F O Matthiessen, Henry James: the major phase (1944)