The literature on Henry James is enormous and ever-changing. The biographies are rich; the criticism both helpful and provocative; and the documentary evidence pertaining to his life, his work, and his world can seem unending. I have benefited from everything I have read but have kept my references to a minimum. These notes indicate the sources of my quotations and mark a few specific debts, but they are not intended to summarize the terms of scholarly debate.
I have used the Library of America volume of James’s Novels, 1881–1886 as my source for the 1881 text of The Portrait of a Lady; for the novel’s revised version and preface in the New York Edition, I’ve drawn on the relevant entry in the series of Oxford World’s Classics. A complete and newly authoritative edition of James’s letters is under way from the University of Nebraska Press, but many of the important ones are already in print, and some of them several times. For quotations from letters I therefore give the date and the recipient, and note whether it remains as of 2012 unpublished, but do not cite any one source for those now available. Interested readers should consult the on-line Calendar of the Letters of Henry James (jamescalendar.unl.edu) about where to find any particular piece of correspondence.
References to standard works—The Prelude, Middlemarch—are given by either line or chapter number but are not keyed to particular editions; in the case of some short poems and essays, I have simply supplied the date. Canny readers may notice that at times I work in close paraphrase of a Jamesian text, or even include the occasional ventriloquized phrase, an unmarked or buried quotation. A good example can be found on my prologue’s first page—“taken possession of it, inhaled it, appropriated it,” words adapted from a letter to his family of 1 November 1875. I have given references for some of these in the notes below, but not all.
All italics in quotations appear in the original.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR SOURCES FREQUENTLY CITED
A—Henry James, Autobiography. Edited by F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion Books, 1956.
CS—Henry James, Complete Stories. 5 vols. New York: Library of America, 1996–99. Reference given with number added (e.g. CS1) to indicate volume.
CTW—Henry James, Collected Travel Writing. Vol. 1: Great Britain and America. Vol. 2: The Continent. New York: Library of America, 1993.
E—Leon Edel, Henry James. 5 vols. New York: Lippincott, 1953–72.
LC—Henry James, Literary Criticism. Vol. 1: Essays, American and English Writers. Vol. 2: European Writers and The Prefaces. New York: Library of America, 1984.
LFL—Michael Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
N—Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
P—The Portrait of a Lady (1st American ed.), in Henry James, Novels, 1881–1886. New York: Library of America, 1985.
PLHJ—Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
PNY—The Portrait of a Lady (New York Edition; revised 1906, published 1908) Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.
WJL—The Correspondence of William James. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 12 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004.
PROLOGUE: AN OLD MAN IN RYE
xiv—He blotted: These pages do not survive in their entirety; those that do can be found at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The best study of them is in Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
xiv—“last manner”: CS4, 350.
xv—“would pretend to date”: Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), 305.
xv—“curiosity and fastidiousness”: P, 242.
xvi—“selective as well as collective”: To J. B. Pinker, 6 June 1905, unpublished.
xvi—“frank critical”: To Charles Scribner’s Sons, 30 July 1905.
xvi—“delicate vessels”: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ch. 11.
xvi—“the surprise of a caravan”: PNY, 16.
xvi—“an American writing”: To William James, 29 October 1888.
xviii—“that which people know”: LC1, 63
xix—“a wedge of brown stone”: PNY, 43.
xx—“the British maiden”: To Alice James, 5 January 1880, unpublished.
xx—“which we find”: LC1, 401–2.
xx—“swarming . . . pretty girls”: CTW1, 707.
xx—“vacancy”: CTW1, 698.
xxi—“mildly pyramidal hill”: To Mrs. William James, 1 December 1897.
xxii—“extraordinary precocity”: See B. R. McElderry, Jr., “Hamlin Garland and Henry James,” American Literature 23.4 (January 1952), esp. 442–43.
xxii—“wistfully an American”: Ibid.
xxii—“room began to sway”: WJL3, 311–12.
xxiii—“hugely improved”: To J. B. Pinker, 10 June 1906, unpublished.
xxiv—“single small” . . . “her destiny”: PNY, 9.
xxiv—“organizing an ado”: Ibid.
PART ONE: A PREPARATION FOR CULTURE
CHAPTER 1: THE GIRL IN THE DOORWAY
3—“tall girl”: P, 204.
3—“a shrewd American”: P, 194.
4—“discovered” . . . “independent”: P, 201.
4—“square and spacious” . . . “shade”: PNY, 9.
5—“not one” . . . “slit-like”: PNY, 7–8.
5—“the consciousness”: Ibid.
5—“Under certain circumstances”: P, 193.
5—“It is a truth”: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ch. 1 (1813).
6—“Oh, I hoped”: P, 205.
6—“there will be”: P, 200.
7—“Miss Brooke had”: George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 1 (1871–72).
7—“nineteen persons”: P, 224.
7—“many oddities” . . . “accident”: P, 211.
7—“You must be”: P, 216.
8—“no mark”: New York Sun, 27 November 1881. The review appeared under the initials MWH, since identified as Mayo Williamson Hazeltine; it can most easily be found in Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
8—“taken up her niece”: P, 212.
8—“continuity between”: P, 225.
8—“so entertaining”: P, 218.
8—“so held her”: PNY, 42.
8—“glimpse of contemporary aesthetics”: P, 225.
9—“with her theory”: P, 214.
9—“almost anything”: P, 218.
9—“physiognomy had an air”: P, 226.
9—“general air”: P, 232.
CHAPTER 2: A NATIVE OF NO COUNTRY
12—A manifest handed: Information about the China can be found at www.immigrantships.net/v7/1800v7/china18680508.html.
12—“always round the corner”: A, 8.
14—“divorced from you”: To William James, 15 July 1878.
14—“Leisured for life”: Quoted in R. W. B. Lewis, The James Family (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 30.
14—“vastation” . . . “room”: Lewis, 51–53.
15—“Say I’m a philosopher”: A, 278.
15—“opportunities had been”: P, 223.
16—“interested in almost”: A, 36.
16—“a native of the James family”: In a letter to their sister Alice, WJL6, 517.
16—“breathed inconsistency”: A, 124.
17—“paying”: A, 126.
17—“a firm grasp”: Quoted in E1, 171.
18—“moral equivalent”: The title of a 1906 speech, most readily found in William James, Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1988).
18—“so much manhood”: Quoted in Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 422.
18—“I had done”: A, 415.
18—“exacerbated by”: E1, 183
18—“during” . . . “history”: A, 414–15. Edel’s biography offers as close a reconstruction of the event as possible; the most suggestive interpretation is that of John Halperin in “Henry James’s Civil War,” Henry James Review 17.1 (1996).
19—“muscular weakness”: Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), 27.
19—“Fortunately he has”: P, 392.
19—“tented field enough”: A, 417.
19—“seeing, sharing”: A, 461.
19—“sense of what”: A, 460.
19—“through our great”: Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 268.
20—“Harry has become”: Quoted in Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry, 249.
20—“secret employments”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 18 April 1864.
20—“Come now” . . . “chose”: A, 107.
21—“scenic method”: N, 167; the notebook entry is for 21 December 1896.
21—“afraid of nothing”: A, 509.
21—“for what he called”: Habegger, 137.
21—William’s most recent biographer: Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
22—“the most delightful”: A, 508.
22—“that I had no”: A, 508.
23—“unwritten history”: CS1, 34.
23—“published me”: LC1, 507.
24—“we seem” . . . “other”: LFL, 471–73.
26—“smiling aspects”: From an 1886 essay on Dostoevsky. See Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, 1886–1897 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 35.
26—“he joined us”: LFL, 472. See also Carol Holly’s essay in David McWhirter, ed., Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
27—“of pulmonary weakness”: PLHJ, 377.
28—“I wish I were”: Minnie’s surviving letters to James appear in Robert Le Clair, “Henry James and Minnie Temple,” American Literature 21 (March 1949), 35–48.
28—“reeling & moaning”: To William James, 30 October 1869.
28—“somehow too much”: To Henry James, Sr., 19 March 1870.
29—“more strange” . . . “painfully?”: To Mary James, 26 March 1870.
29—“reach & quality” . . . “dead”: To William James, 29 March 1870.
29—“the death of”: Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846).
CHAPTER 3: A SUPERSTITIOUS VALUATION
31—“the more I see”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 18 July 1860.
31—“is obliged to deal”: N, 214.
31—“we can deal” . . . “culture”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 20 September 1867.
32—“Wendell” . . . “moonshiny”: To Charles Eliot Norton, 4 Febuary 1872.
33—“neatness and coquetry”: To William James, 22 September 1872.
34—“rattling big”: To Elizabeth Boott, 27 January 1875.
35—“there is no shadow”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860), preface.
35—“texture of American life” . . . “one may say”: LC1, 351–52.
35—critic Robert Weisbuch: My argument in this chapter is indebted to Robert Weisbuch’s Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See also his “Dickens, Melville, and a Tale of Two Countries” in the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
36—“It takes a great deal”: LC1, 320.
36—“that we very soon”: LC1, 327.
36—One classic account: See “Novel and Romance” in Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957).
36—“asked but little”: LC1, 341.
36—“do New York”: To Edith Wharton, 17 August 1902.
37—“not from the sweet”: In M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), p. 120.
38—“the appearance, the manner”: To his parents, 16 November 1873.
38—“could do more work”: WJL4, 452.
38—“set of desultory”: WJL4, 458.
38—“as a matter”: WJL1, 230.
40—“before him, soliciting”: PNY, 5.
40—“youth of genius”: To Grace Norton, 26 September 1870.
40—“in every day at dusk”: The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, ed. George Monteiro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 4.
40—“unutterably filthy”: To Theodore Child, 17 February 1880.
41—“a fraud” . . . “people”: The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 392–93.
41—“not at all crazy”: To Elizabeth Boott, 22 February 1880, unpublished.
41—“conspiracy to undervalue them”: LC1, 435.
42—“gentlemen’s society”: CS2, 246.
42—“high time Harry James”: Monteiro, Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 5.
42—“big”: To Henry James, Sr., 30 March 1880.
42—“the portrait of the character”: To William Dean Howells, 2 February 1877.
42—“to which the American”: To Mary James, 4 May 1877, unpublished.
44—“open window”: To Henry James, 30 March 1880.
CHAPTER 4: ALONG THE THAMES
45—“far-away-from-London”: To Mary James, 10 January 1881.
46—“infusion” . . . “as it were”: To Grace Norton, 28 December 1880.
46—“going to do” . . . “her own”: P, 254–55.
46—“stood there” . . . “her destiny”: PNY, 9.
47—“gruel and silence”: A, 525.
47—“a view”: To J. B. Pinker, 14 June 1906.
47—“a good deal bruised”: P, 194. See also the entry for Hardwick in Nikolaus Pevsner and Jennifer Sherwood, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
48—“no more beautiful”: Country Life, 21 July 1906.
49—Family tradition. See the family entry in Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; but note too that the biographies of Grahame himself do not confirm this identification.
50—“shut out”: P, 228.
50—“an uninteresting”: P, 229.
50—“conscious observation”: P, 231.
50—“looked in at”: P, 254.
50—“to pass through”: P, 251.
51—“young, happy”: P, 238.
51—“in the thick, mild air”: P, 245.
51—“always want” . . . “choose”: P, 259.
52—“Whoso” . . . “always may”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841).
52—“proof that a woman”: P, 243.
53—“I like to be treated”: P, 288.
53—“cultivated”: Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 153. Parkman’s article, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,” originally appeared in the North American Review (July–August 1878).
54—“alienated”: P, 278.
54—“than one gives up”: P, 282.
54—“well-ordered privacy”: P, 245.
PART TWO: THE MARRIAGE PLOT
CHAPTER 5: HER EMPTY CHAIR
57—“I have just heard”: To John W. Cross, 14 May 1880.
58—“which your wife”: Ibid.
58—“aghast at”: WJL1, 183
59—“I knew he” . . . “the wall”: To Henry James, Sr., 14 May 1880, unpublished.
60—“Aren’t you sorry?”: To Grace Norton, 19 August 1880, unpublished.
60—“empty chair”: To Alice James, 30 January 1881.
60—“thoroughly ill”: Quoted in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 544.
60—“a Reticence”: Quoted in John Rignall, ed., The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26.
61—“Johnnie had”: Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), vol. 7 (1878–80), 285.
61—“I had my turn”: To William James, 1 May 1878.
61—“to attend service”: In Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 454.
62—“underlying world”: To Henry James, Sr., 10 May 1869.
62—“take them . . . visitor”: A, 583–84.
63—“we of the . . . comparison”: A, 573–74.
63—“‘Middlemarch . . . whole”: LC1, 958.
63—“two suns”: LC1, 962.
64—“without loss . . . monsters”: LC2, 1107–8.
64—“deep-breathing economy”: Ibid.
64—“sets a limit”: LC1, 965.
65—“marriages and rescue” . . . “happy art”: LC1, 1004.
65—“aesthetic teaching”: The statement comes in a letter to the Positivist thinker Frederic Harrison and can be most readily found in George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), p 248.
65—“commissioned herself”: LC1, 965.
66—“special case”: LC1, 1003.
66—“generalizing instinct”: LC1, 965.
66—“have less”: To Grace Norton, 5 March 1873.
66—“In these frail”: PNY, 10.
66—“mind and millinery”: In George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, 140.
66—“scientific criticism”: P, 242.
CHAPTER 6: PROPOSALS
68—“husbands, wives”: LC1, 48.
69—“Millions of”: PNY, 9.
69—“all-in-all”: PNY, 11.
69—“We women”: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), ch. 13.
69—“flood and field”: PNY, 15.
69—“the centre”: PNY, 11.
70—“must not fall”: P, 201.
70—Isabel’s resistance to the plot: My argument in this chapter is indebted to Millicent Bell’s indispensable account of The Portrait of a Lady in her Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
70—“a woman ought” . . . “completely”: P, 243–44.
70—“It’s just like”: P, 205.
71—“a most formidable . . . fear”: P, 272–73.
71—“cold and dry”: PNY, 65.
71—an alternate line of criticism: See esp. Nina Baym’s “Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady,” which locates the character in her historical moment. (Modern Fiction Studies 22.2, Summer 1976; repr., in 2nd Norton Critical Edition of the novel, ed. Robert D. Bamberg [New York: W. W. Norton, 1995].)
72—“May I not”: P, 293.
73—“such a thumper”: P, 300.
73—“some people”: P, 304.
73—“it cost her”: Ibid.
73—“I’m afraid”: P, 301.
73—“personage”: P, 295.
73—“what one liked”: P, 296.
74—“Imagine one’s belonging”: P, 248.
74—“old-fashioned distinction” . . . “certain way”: LC1, 54–55.
75—“psychological reasons”: LC1, 60.
75—“few things”: LC1, 61.
75—“she could do better”: P, 296.
75—“Who was she”: P, 304.
76—“Do you know . . . lord!”: P, 303.
CHAPTER 7: AN UNMARRIED MAN
77—some representative titles: Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925); Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James, and Some Other American Writers (1952); Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881 (1962).
78—That emphasis suited: See Michael Anesko, Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
78—“a smile”: CTW2, 338–40.
78—“dim sense”: Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: Morrow, 1992), 300.
78—“a most tender” . . . “friendship”: To Alice James, 24 May 1876.
78—“strange” . . . “oddity”: LFL, 471.
78—“verbal passion”: Kaplan, 300.
79—“undersized . . . men”: Theodore Roosevelt, “What Americanism Means.” Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), 480.
79—“separate, not unworkable”: Philip Larkin, “The Importance of Elsewhere” (1955).
79—“the deepest thing”: To W. Morton Fullerton, 2 October 1900.
80—“Londonized”: To Charles Eliot Norton, 17 November 1878.
80—“Mrs. James”: To William James, 1 May 1878.
80—“as if it were”: To William James, 23 June 1878.
80—“of all the men”: E. S. Nadal, “Personal Recollections of Henry James,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1920, 94.
81—“This last report”: To Mary James, 31 October 1880.
81—“generally felt . . . all to myself”: To Grace Norton, 7 November 1880.
82—“the gospel”: CS2, 865.
82—“most objectionable”: CS2, 886.
83—“poor S.’s wife”: N, 25.
83—“the innermost” . . . “covert”: To Edmund Gosse. 9 June 1884.
83—“somdomite” [sic] . . . “vicious”: See Graham Robb’s Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), an exemplary synthesis of research in the field, albeit one that concentrates on the lives and situations of the articulate and the intellectual. Its accounts of Symonds and Wilde are especially useful.
84—“band of the emulous”: To Edmund Gosse, 7 January 1898.
84—“mild cultured man”: To William James, 28 February 1877.
85—“who love”: To J. A. Symonds, 22 February 1884.
85—“unclean beast”: E3, 31.
85—“He was never”: To Edmund Gosse, 8 April 1895.
85—“a position in society”: Nadal, 90.
85—“being what I am” . . . “second best”: The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (New York: Random House, 1984), 184–85.
86—“She made”: P, 782.
86—“always based”: Tzvetan Todorov, “The Secret of Narrative,” in The Poetics of Prose (1971), trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 145. Both this essay and its companion piece in the same volume, “The Ghosts of Henry James,” are among the most suggestive things ever written about James’s work.
87—“name for everything”: Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919). The standard translation is by James Strachey.
88—“loved his friends”: Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (1924; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, ed. Lyall H. Powers), 48.
89—“darlingest Hugh!”: E5, 409.
89—“I can’t!”: See the introduction to Leon Edel, Henry James Letters, vol. 4, 1895–1916 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), xix. Edel presents the story as a form of urban legend, with Walpole telling it to Somerset Maugham, who told it to everyone.
89—“a horror” . . . “physical love”: Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 724–25.
89—biographer Sheldon Novick: See his Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996), 109–10.
89—L’initiation première: N, 238.
89—“regret a single”: To Hugh Walpole, 21 August 1913. L4 680.
90—“supposed that he was” . . . “visible the face”: Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 42–43.
91—“oasis” . . . “distingué”: To William James, 25 April 1876. The novelist always referred to his friend by the French version of his family name—Joukowsky. On their relations, see, in addition to Novick, Peter Brooks’s Henry James Goes to Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
91—“extreme purity” . . . “him”: To Alice James, 24 May 1876.
92—“musical séance” . . . “failure”: To Henry James, Sr., 11 November 1876.
92—“peculiar”: To Henry James, Sr., 30 March 1880.
92—“sturdy, thickset”: Cosima Wagner, Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–80) vol. 2, 432.
92—“rescued”: Wagner, 439.
93—“opposed to those” . . . “nothing else”: To Grace Norton, 9 April 1880.
93—“vileness” . . . “immoralities”: To Alice James, 25 April 1880.
93—Kaplan suggests: See pp. 223–24 of his biography.
94—“Non ragioniam”: N, 216.
CHAPTER 8: A LONDON LIFE
95—“murky metropolis”: To Mary James, 6 August 1877.
95—“and Paris was”: N, 215.
95—“if I sometimes”: CTW2, 720.
96—“I don’t like”: To William Dean Howells, 28 May 1876.
96—“say nothing”: To William James, 13 October 1876.
97—“beyond expression”: To Mary James, 24 December 1876.
98—Lionel Trilling: “The Princess Casamassima,” in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking Press, 1950).
98—“came to know”: N, 218.
99—“better sort”: This is the title James gave to a 1903 collection of stories.
99—“conversing affably”: To William James, 29 March 1877.
99—“agreeable” . . . “form of life”: N, 217–18.
100—“You can do”: Letter of 28 October 1885. In The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Booth and Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), vol. 5, 143.
100—“the traces”: CTW1, 118.
100—“the dingy, British”: CTW1, 296.
100—“modern conversation”: CTW1, 190.
101—“cabinets and parties”: Bosanquet, 52.
101—“insidious, perfidious” . . . “good deal”: To William Dean Howells, 18 April 1880.
101—“himself . . . too hard”: To Mary James, 4 July 1880.
101—“tremendous material bribe”: WJL5, 121.
101—“inscrutable”: WJL5, 105.
102—“dinners and parties” . . . “few points”: WJL5, 121.
102—“transitory” . . . “show them”: To Mary James, 4 July 1880.
103—“the whole of”: To William Dean Howells, 20 July 1880.
103—“tant bien”: N, 219.
103—“for a sniff” . . . “to work”: To Alice James, 9 October 1880, unpublished.
104—“with such tact”: To Mary James, 28 November 1880.
104—“steadily, but very slowly”: N, 220.
CHAPTER 9: THE ENVELOPE OF CIRCUMSTANCES
105—“strictures on” . . . “so much”: To William Dean Howells, 5 December 1880.
106—“entertainment of seeing”: P, 344.
106—“whether this or that”: P, 418.
106—“stubbornest fact”: P, 309.
107—“remember what”: P, 357.
107—“She had done”: P, 359.
107—“You are drifting” . . . “immoral novel”: P, 361.
107—“I shall have”: P, 374.
108—“if certain things”: P, 377.
108—“never prevaricated”: P, 374.
108—“Daddy” . . . “miss you”: Ibid.
109—“cloven foot”: The Spectator’s review was by R. H. Hutton and appeared on 26 November 1881; reprinted in Roger Gard, Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
109—“I take” . . . “veiled acuteness”: P, 378.
109—“to marry for a support”: P, 379.
109—“immoral”: P, 381.
109—“see her going”: P, 380.
109—“hovered before him”: PNY, 5.
110—“to see what”: P, 378.
110—and bank stock: See Elliot M. Schrero, “How Rich Was Isabel Archer?” Henry James Review 20.1 (1999).
111—“should so strongly”: P, 368.
111—“I am Madame Merle”: P, 369.
111—“deeply recognizes”: PNY, 15–16.
111—“woman of ardent impulses”: P, 371.
112—“to see what”: P, 384.
112—“preposterous”: P, 396.
112—“yours was” . . . “his house”: P, 397.
112—“When you have lived”: P, 397–98.
113—“I think just”: Ibid.
113—“What she wore”: In the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001), 79.
114—“of a new adventure”: R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 5.
114—“to leave the past”: P, 222.
114—“the supremacy of the individual”: LC1, 383.
114—“you think” . . . “called I”: Emerson, “The Transcendentalist” (1841). Like both “History” and “Self-Reliance,” it forms a chapter in Emerson’s Essays: First Series.
115—“ripe unconsciousness of evil”: LC1, 254.
115—“no special providence”: Quoted in Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters (New York: Penguin, 2006), 181.
115—“a man’s Me”: The passage comes in Chapter XII. See William James: Writings, 1878–1899 (New York: Library of America, 1992), 174–75. I am grateful to Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) for making this connection between the work of the two brothers.
116—“the self as known” . . . “as knower”: William James: Writings, 1878–1899, 174.
116—“empirical aggregate” . . . “be an aggregate”: William James: Writings, 1878–1899, 208.
116—“Whatever I may”: William James: Writings, 1878–1899, 174.
PART THREE: ITALIAN JOURNEYS
CHAPTER 10: BELLOSGUARDO HOURS
121—“well spoken of”: Baedeker’s Northern Italy, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1879), 342.
122—“If you’re an aching alien”: CTW2, 403.
122—“big enough”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letters, 1857–1864 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 150–51.
122—“a little grassy” . . . “front”: P, 423.
123—“colored a dull”: From Roderick Hudson in Henry James, Novels, 1871–1880 (New York: Library of America, 1983), 455.
123—“peeping up”: CTW2, 520.
124—“incommunicative” . . . “no eyes”: P, 423.
124—“We are a wretched” . . . “anywhere”: P, 392.
125—“He is Gilbert” . . . “no anything”: P, 393.
125—“American absentees”: P, 408.
125—“can you get”: P, 411.
126—“unsatisfactory life”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, French and Italian Notebooks, ed. Thomas Woodson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 437.
126—“sombre kind”: Ibid., 442.
126—“hardly spoken to”: To Grace Norton, 14 January 1874.
127—“had been exactly” . . . “unemployed”: CTW2, 396–97.
127—“a rounded pearl”: To William James, 27 December 1869.
128—“the clatter of”: LC2, 1043.
128—“easy, friendly”: To Catherine Walsh, 3 May 1880, unpublished.
128—“one is liable”: To Alice James, 25 April 1880.
128—“an unconventional”: PLHJ, 151.
129—“my true country”: Leon Edel prints the four surviving letters from Woolson to James in vol. 3 of his edition of James’s letters. See Henry James Letters, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 551.
129—“if your sentence”: “Miss Grief,” in Lippincott’s Magazine, May 1880. Repr., in Constance Fenimore Woolson, Selected Stories and Travel Narratives, ed. Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 209.
130—“amiable, but deaf”: To Alice James, 25 April 1880.
130—“authoress” . . . “intense”: To Catherine Walsh, 3 May 1880, unpublished.
130—“horrible ignorance”: Letter from spring 1880 to a Mrs. Crowell, in Five Generations, Part Second—Constance Fenimore Woolson, arranged and edited by Clare Benedict (London, 1930), 188. This is a privately printed collection of letters and papers from Woolson’s extended family, compiled by her niece.
130—“likes to be”: From “A Florentine Experiment,” in Woolson, Selected Stories, P. 228.
131—“the two destroyed”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 524.
131—“that sweet young American”: Ibid., 545.
132—“you said, in answer”: Ibid., 539.
CHAPTER 11: MR. OSMOND
133—“pass for anything”: P, 425.
133—“for the consideration”: P, 463.
133—“not to strive”: P, 462.
134—“approached each other”: P, 437.
134—“I know plenty”: P, 437.
134—“it seem more”: P, 445.
135—“as if, once”: P, 451.
135—“to types which”: PNY, 459.
135—“studious life” . . . “fatherhood”: P, 476.
136—“she is a little”: P, 464.
136—“that man”: P, 474.
136—“coarse imputation” . . . “by selfishness”: P, 504.
136—“willful renunciation”: P, 462.
137—“good humour”: P, 502.
137—“are perfect”: P, 439.
137—“for a cabinet”: CTW2, 360.
138—“mental constitution”: To Alice James, 25 April 1880.
139—“Italianate bereft” . . . “Gilbert Osmond”: A, 522.
139—“traditionary”: P, 425.
139—“as the only”: P, 439.
140—“looking very well”: P, 437.
140—“the girl is not” . . . “sacrificed”: P, 483–84.
CHAPTER 12: STRANIERI
141—“passing travellers”: Augustus Hare, Walks in Rome (New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1873), 1.
142—“the fresh, cool”: P, 485.
143—“a young lady”: The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 1: 1858–1868, ed. J. C. Levenson et al. (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 135.
143—“as if it were Clapham”: P, 490.
143—“I have first or last”: To William James, 9 April 1873.
143—“a double ruin”: Journals of John Cheever, ed. Susan Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1991), 72.
144—“palpable imaginable”: LC2, 1177.
144—“what the grand”: Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1903), vol. 1, 341.
145—“cleverness” . . . “is greater”: To Charles Eliot Norton, 31 March 1873.
145—“precursors”: William Wetmore Story and His Friends, vol. 1, 3.
145—“consciousness of the complicated”: Ibid., 6.
146—The historian John Pemble: These figures, and Pemble’s explanation, come from personal correspondence, an email of 23 September 2007.
146—travel writer Bayard Taylor: See Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, ed. Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder. 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895), vol. 2, 490.
146—“Americans Abroad”: Lippincott’s, May 1894, 679.
146—Murray and Baedeker: The picture of the Anglo-American business community here is a composite drawn from the following editions: A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs, 5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1858), 11th ed. (1872), 12th ed. (1881); Central Italy and Rome, 9th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1886).
147—“remarkably ugly”: To Alice James, 10 February 1873.
148—“at all regret”: To Henry James, Sr., 4 March 1873.
148—“I doubt that”: To William James, 9 April 1873.
148—“in the position”: To Mary James, 24 March 1873.
149—“without relations”: To Mary James, 26 January 1873.
149—“curl up, like”: Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 5, p. 524.
149—“It seems stupid”: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ch. 24.
150—“with its economical”: CTW2, 392.
150—“the ruins of”: P, 723
151—“imported” . . . “moral responsibility”: LC1, 363.
152—“dingy drollery”: CTW2, 416.
153—“a terrible game”: CTW2, 421.
153—“I made no vows”: The Prelude, Book IV, ll. 341–42.
153—“close seat”: To Mary James, 24 March 1873.
153—“the very source”: CTW2, 440.
153—“unbroken continuity” . . . “one else.”: CTW2, 444.
CHAPTER 13: AN UNCERTAIN TERRAIN
155—“I didn’t come”: P, 493.
155—“good fellow” . . . “he’s not”: P, 495.
156—“Does she” . . . “horribly”: PNY, 298.
156—“qualified herself”: P, 501.
157—“one ought to”: P, 507.
157—“that I find”: P, 509.
157—“immense sweetness”: P, 509.
157—“ought to have”: Ibid.
158—“the sharpness of the pang”: PNY, 310.
158—“behind bolts”: P, 222.
158—Matthew Arnold: “The Buried Life,” ll. 84–85.
158—“everything that’s proper” . . . “itself”: P, 511.
158—“agitation” . . . “treacherous”: P, 512.
159—ellipses in its narrative: I borrow this word from Millicent Bell, and my argument is indebted to her account of Isabel’s resistance to and acceptance of plot.
160—“individual technique”: Graham Greene, “The Dark Backward,” in Collected Essays (1964; repr., Penguin, 1970), 56.
161—“the dark, shining” . . . “she chose”: P, 522.
162—“I would rather”: P, 528.
162—“I had no idea”: P, 543.
162—“You are going”: P, 543.
162—“more importance”: P, 545.
162—“soaring . . . sailing”: P, 546.
163—“a man to whom” . . . “of any sort”: P, 548–49.
163—“his very poverties”: P, 550.
164—“I hope it may never”: P, 547.
164—“disjoined”: P, 551.
164—“detestably fortunate” . . . “envying someone”: P, 498–99.
CHAPTER 14: A VENETIAN INTERLUDE
165—“the temperature ferocious”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 24 January 1881.
165—“quietly bring my”: N, 220.
165—“Frenchified” . . . “digestion”: To Fanny Kemble, 24 February 1881.
166—“dusky light”: N, 220.
166—“virtually finished”: N, 221.
166—Baedeker for 1879: Venice then had 128,000 inhabitants.
166—“painfully large”: CTW2, 289.
167—“be lived in”: CTW2, 329.
167—“awful”: CTW2, 330. For the gondoliers’ strike, along with much else about the nineteenth-century city, see Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
167—“battered peep show”: CTW2, 292.
167—“the most beautiful”: CTW2, 314.
168—“una bellezza”: N, 221.
168—“simpler pleasure[s]”: CTW2, 289.
168—“one of those things”: N, 221.
168—“sentient”: CTW2, 291.
169—“craved more to possess”: Quoted in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi et al., Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004), 255.
171—“like a camel’s back”: CTW2, 297. On this point see Zorzi’s “A Knock-Down Insolence of Talent,” in Sargent’s Venice, ed. Warren Adelson et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
171—“in the fruitless”: NPY, 3.
171—“even the brightest”: CTW2, 298.
171—“The creature varies”: CTW2, 291.
172—“between the niece”: CTW2, 296.
172—“be a sad day”: CTW2, 287.
172—“you renounce all”: CTW2, 305.
CHAPTER 15: FENIMORE
174—“sky-parlor”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 557.
175—“Poor Isabel!”: Ibid., 533.
175—“I suppose there”: Ibid., 540.
175—“a woman”: Ibid., 352.
176—“immense power”: To Elizabeth Boott, 18 October 1886.
176—“thought the carriage”: PLHJ, 199.
176—“hide”: To Francis Boott, 26 November 1886.
176—“promiscuous polyglot”: To Sarah Butler Wister, 27 February 1887.
176—“making love to Italy”: To Edmund Gosse, 24 April 1887.
178—“local tone”: LC1, 664.
178—“that the old lady”: N, 33.
178—“in obscurity”: CS3, 228.
179—“publishing scoundrel”: CS3, 303.
179—“an out-of-the-way canal”: CS3, 228.
179—“make love”: CS3, 235.
179—“get out of it”: CS3, 314.
180—“Henry is somewhere”: PLHJ, 231.
181—“giving up being”: PLHJ, 248.
182—“to Miss Woolson”: To Ariana Curtis, 14 July 1893.
182—“whether the end”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 550.
182—“alone and unfriended”: To William W. Baldwin, 26 January 1894.
182—“sudden dementia”: To Francis Boott, 31 January 1894.
182—“sills overlooking”: PLHJ, 276.
183—“After such an event”: To Francis Boott, 31 January 1894.
183—“too many and too private”: To William W. Baldwin, 2 February 1894.
184—“all her precious things”: PLHJ, 286.
185—“and they came up like balloons”: PLHJ, 289. This is the most readily available source for the anecdote; one can also find it in Gondola Day, 145. Gordon draws the story from a 1956 radio interview with Mercedes Huntington, whose words are quoted here. Her family owned the Villa Castellani, and she claimed to have heard it as a young woman from James himself; a transcript of the interview is available at Harvard’s Houghton Library. But sources closer to the period attest to it as well; see Gondola Days.
185—“never failed” . . . “behaviour”: CS3, 230.
185—“If her depression”: Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, 383.
187—“to whom nothing”: CS5, 540.
187—“The Beast in the Closet”: See the chapter of that title in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
188—“have appreciated”: CS2, 295.
PART FOUR: SEX AND SERIALS, THE CONTINENT AND THE CRITICS
CHAPTER 16: MAUPASSANT AND THE MONKEY
191—“suggestive of” . . . “sun-bonnets”: The piece originally ran in the Galaxy for June 1875. It’s reprinted in Henry James, The Painter’s Eye, ed. John L Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 96–97.
192—Some Victorian commentators: See Kate Flint’s analysis in The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ch. 4.
192—“bring a blush”: Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ch. 11. On blushing, see Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 5.
193—“Two ladies from the country”: From George Moore, “A New Censorship of Literature,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 December 1884.
193—after a one-day trial: See the trial transcript, “The Ministry of Justice Against Gustave Flaubert,” trans. Bregtje Hartendorf Wallach in the Norton Critical Edition of Madame Bovary, ed. Margaret Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
193—“no English author” . . . “to read?”: James Fitzjames Stephen, “Madame Bovary,” Saturday Review, 11 July 1857.
194—“cleanliness” . . . “Expurgatorius”: Margaret Oliphant, “Novels,” Blackwood’s, September 1867.
194—“the novels of her”: Ibid.
194—“into the hands”: See Cohen, ed. “Madame Bovary,” 333.
195—“between that which”: LC1, 63.
195—“Candour in Fiction”: New Review, January 1890. Hardy’s comments are on p. 20.
195—“there is a terrible coercion”: Adam Bede, ch. 29.
196—“rather shy”: LC1, 63.
196—“I would rather”: P, 558.
196—French verb is branler: See any complete edition of the Goncourt diary; this section is available in an English translation by Robert Baldick, Pages from the Goncourt Journal (1962; repr., New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2006), 212–14.
197—“Le petit Maupassant”: Ibid.
197—“right mental preparation”: To Edmund Gosse, 17 October 1912.
197—“as if her sky”: From Henry James, Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune, 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), 40. This passage comes from a piece itself called “Parisian Sketches,” his letter for December 28, 1875.
198—“rather embarrassed”: To Henry James, Sr., 20 December 1875. On James’s Parisian experiences, see Peter Brooks, Henry James Goes to Paris.
199—“editor of the austere Atlantic”: To William Dean Howells, 3 February 1876. James records Howells’s reply in a letter of 4 April, and the Goncourt Diary lets us date the conversation to Sunday, 30 January; see Baldick, 220.
200—“with astronomy” . . . “well-written”: LC2, 1014.
201—“more totally” . . . “or catches”: LC2, 892–93.
201—“misery, vice” . . . “disagreeable”. LC2, 861–62.
202—“nature . . . as a combination”: LC2, 866.
202—“poverty of . . . consciousness”: LC2, 327–28.
202—“English system”: LC2, 869.
202—“than the effort”: To William Dean Howells, 21 February 1884.
202—“I have to hide”: Howells, Selected Letters, 1882–1891 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 12. The letter is to John Hay.
202—“when Nana raised”: Émile Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (London: Penguin, 1972), 44.
203—“foulness”: LC2, 867.
203—“her sexual parts”: Nana, 385.
203—Henry Vizetelly: On his editions of Zola, and the novelist’s reception in England, see Anthony Cummins, “Émile Zola’s Cheap English Dress: The Vizetelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value,” Review of English Studies 60 (2008), 108–32.
203—“l’âge ingrat”: The phrase comes two pages in to Nana’s third chapter; Holden (75) translates it as “awkward.”
204—“‘good’ talk?”: LC2, 1125.
204—“old castles” . . . “ancient monuments”: CS2, 247.
205—“a great deal”: CS2, 246.
205—“clever little reprobate”: CS2, 291.
205—“old enough” . . . “should like it”: CS2, 275.
206—“portrait of a gentleman”: Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ch. 14. Elizabeth Ammons’s “Cool Diana and Blood Red Muse” points out the nominal relation between Wharton’s protagonist and James’s own. See the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, ed. Candace Waid (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
207—“mustn’t think”: Ibid., ch 16.
207—“at Florence with”: Ibid., ch 20.
CHAPTER 17: THE MAGAZINES
208—“stifling calidarium”: N, 223.
208—“I am afraid”: To Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 13 July 1881.
208—“probably not less”: To William Dean Howells, 23 August 1879.
209—The two were: See George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2003); and Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). On the economic necessity of serialization, see Howells, “The Man of Letters as Man of Business” (1893).
211—“next long story” . . . “remember this”: To William Dean Howells, 14–15 July 1879.
213—“devoured in the American papers”: To Frederick Macmillan, 28 December 1880.
213—“stretch of months”: To William Dean Howells, 5 December 1880.
213—“been explicit as”: To William Dean Howells, 11 November 1880.
213—“strangely vague”: To William Dean Howells, 5 December 1880.
213—“after Isabel’s marriage”: N, 13–14.
214—“to be settled later”: Ibid.
214—“process and progress”: Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 243.
215—“steady development”: Ibid., 275.
218—“no magazine”: Joseph Conrad, 6 January 1908. In Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 4: 1908–1911, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9–10.
219—“slow, sure growth” . . . “whole”: Hughes and Lund, 230.
219—James’s income: See Michael Anesko’s meticulous “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Appendix B.
220—“nothing can be”: The Spectator, 6 November 1880.
220—“considerably the most important”: The Nation, 24 March 1881.
220—“the reader feels”: The Nation, 18 November 1880.
220—“quite too lifelike”: The Examiner, November 6 1880.
221—“the author evidently”: Ibid., December 4, 1880.
221—“One afternoon, toward dusk”: P, 559.
CHAPTER 18: THE ROCCANERA
222—“will perhaps”: P, 559.
223—“if her husband”: P, 562.
223—“who died two”: P, 564–65.
224—“years had touched”: P, 570.
225—“these people”: P, 567.
225—“genius for upholstery”: P, 588.
225—“high house”: Ibid. P, 566.
225—“stern old Roman”: Ibid.
225—Palazzo Antici-Mattei: See Charles S. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham, NC: Duke University Pres, 1977), 292. See also Harry Brewster, A Cosmopolite’s Journey (London: Radcliffe Press, 1998), 182, a memoir by an expatriate of another generation who spent a part of his childhood there.
225—Mattei family: On their ownership of work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, see Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting (New York: Random House, 2005).
226—“a row of”: P, 566–67.
226—“traditionary”: P, 425.
227—“reflective reader”: P, 592.
228—“there’s the difference” . . . “leading one?”: P, 603–4.
228—“received an impression”: P, 611.
228—“make him the reparation”: P, 617.
228—“play the part”: P, 618.
229—“The moment you”: P, 625.
229—“It lies in”: P, 626.
229—“has all the vivacity”: PNY, 16.
230—“service her husband had” . . . “terrors”: P, 628.
230—“he could change”: P, 630.
230—“stream of consciousness”: William James, Writings, 1878–1899, 152.
231—“make-believe” . . . “no retrospect”: Daniel Deronda, ch. 1.
232—“oblique view” . . . “impression of it”: LC2, 1322.
232—“He had told her”: P, 633–34.
233—free indirect discourse: See, for starters, Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).
233—“dark, narrow alley” . . . “one by one”: P, 629.
234—“everlasting weight”: P, 638.
234—her life go undramatized: See Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 116–17.
234—“solidity of specification”: LC1, 53.
235—“the different pace”: William James, Writings 1878–1899, 987.
235—“like one who should say”: Ibid., 164.
235—“defeated”: To William James, 21 April 1884.
235—“chamber”: LC1, 52.
236—“luminous halo”: Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 154.
236—“It is obviously”: PNY, 16.
237—“anxiously and yet ardently”: PNY, 423.
238—“was not a daughter” . . . “at all”: P, 636.
238—“indecent”: P, 637.
238—“her husband and Madame Merle”: P, 639.
Chapter 19: The Art of Fiction
239—Macmillan released: For these bibliographical details, see Leon Edel and Dan Laurence, A Bibliography of Henry James, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and David J. Supino, Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006). The Robert Frost Library at Amherst College made its copy of the Macmillan edition available to me; for the Houghton, Mifflin, I used the copy belonging to the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College.
240—Mudie’s: The standard work remains Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), to which I am indebted throughout this chapter.
241—“gains in its”: W. C. Brownell, The Nation, 2 February 1882.
241—The New York Sun: 27 November, 1881; Californian, January 1882; both in Hayes, Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews. Horace Scudder’s review appeared in the Atlantic for January 1882, and Margaret Oliphant’s in Blackwood’s for March 1882. Both appear in Bamberg.
242—Lippincott’s: See The Contemporary Reviews.
243—“your talent, your style” . . . “like it”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 528–35.
244—“new school” . . . “Thackeray”: Reprinted in Gard, 126–35.
244—“at the exploits”: Margaret Oliphant, “American Literature in England.” Blackwood’s, January 1883, 137.
244—“principle that”: L. L. Jennings, “American Novels,” Quarterly Review (January 1883), 225.
245—“The indictment”: To William Dean Howells, 27 November 1882.
245—“as thick as blackberries”: To William Dean Howells, 20 March 1883.
245—“bright, troubled” . . . “conscience”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” Longman’s Magazine (November 1882), 189–90.
246—“Boston Mutual Admiration Society”: Jennings, 251.
246—“to edge in” . . . “extent opened”: LC1, 44. James’s essay first appeared in Longman’s Magazine for September 1884. Besant’s own lecture was published together with James’s in 1884 (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co.) and appeared separately in 1902 (London: Chatto.) It is excerpted in Stephen Regan, The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
247—“course of dessert” . . . “impossible”: LC1, 48.
247—“psychological”: LC1, 61.
248—“a living thing”: LC1, 54–55.
248—“What is character”: Ibid.
248—“A Humble Remonstrance”: Longman’s Magazine, December 1884.
249—“That is the highest”: E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 45.
249—“shallow optimism”: LC1, 65.
249—“on the principle”: To William Dean Howells, 21 February 1884.
250—Child wrote: “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic (May 1884), 724–27.
250—“evaporate”: To Auguste Monod, 17 December 1905.
250—“had as yet”: “Contributors’ Club,” 726.
250—“galley-slaves”: To Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 13 February 1884.
250—“tepid soap”: To William Dean Howells, 21 February 1884.
250—Mario Vargas Llosa: See his Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary, trans. Helen Lane (1975; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 220.
251—“moral passion”: LC1, 63.
251—“the great American”: To William Dean Howells, 21 February 1884.
251—“brutal indecency”: LC2, 861.
252—“timidity”: LC2, 880.
252—“hard and fast”: LC2, 549.
252—“carnal side of man”: LC2, 548.
253—“the constant world-renewal”: LC1, 107.
253—“deeply in the quiet”: LC1, 109.
253—“impeded by the”: Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Death of the Moth (London: Hogarth Press, 1942); the essay originated as a talk given to the National Society for Women’s Service in 1931.
253—“falsify the total show”: LC2, 964. See also David McWhirter, “Saying the Unsayable: James’s Realism in the Late 1890s,” Henry James Review 20 (1999).
PART FIVE: PUTTING OUT THE LIGHTS
CHAPTER 20: THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD
257—“Darling old father”: WJL5, 227.
258—“worn and shrunken”: N, 229.
258—“ought to be”: N, 216.
259—“hand to its”: N, 225.
259—“old world—my choice”: N, 214.
260—“have ceased to suffer”: To Mary James, 29 January 1882.
260—“all that has gone”: N, 229.
260—“sweetness and beneficence”: N, 229.
260—“neither ideal nor ethereal”: E3, 38.
261—“the most supremely”: Letter to William James of 30 July 1891; in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 186.
261—“tensions and emotions”: E3, 38.
261—“obscene bird of night”: Henry James, Sr., Substance and Shadow (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), 75.
262—“beneficent hush”: N, 232.
262—“a way of his own”: To Mrs. Francis Mathews, 13 February 1882.
262—“Here lies a man”: From the entry for 24 June 1891 in The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 217.
263—“softening of the” . . . “almost natural”: To William James, 26 December 1882.
263—“heard somewhere” . . . “my belief”: To William James, 1 January 1883.
264—“feeling somewhat unprotected”: WJL5, 228.
265—“let her off easy”: CS4, 217.
265—“complete appreciation”: LC1, 1333.
265—“a past which is”: LC1, 233.
265—“When the mortal”: LC2, 1006.
265—“an air of”: LC2, 1016.
266—“I bade him”: LC2, 1026.
266—“ruled by a”: CS4, 450.
267—“do something great”: N, 233.
CHAPTER 21: “I WAS PERFECTLY FREE”
268—“in small pieces”: P, 654.
268—“enough to do”: P, 653.
269—“visibly happy”: P, 705.
269—“direct opposition” . . . “of marriage”: P, 667.
269—“I can’t publish”: P, 694.
269—“have to take”: P, 667.
269—“that had once”: P, 724.
269—“old Rome into”: P, 723–24.
270—“through the veil”: Ibid.
270—“I was perfectly”: P, 694.
271—“free and separate”: Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” Encounter, January 1961.
272—“when one is”: P, 721.
272—“Let him off”: P, 723.
272—“mocking voice” . . . “destiny”: P, 720.
272—“Who are you” . . . “Everything”: P, 723.
273—“the man in the world”: P, 725.
273—“that the worst”: P, 726.
273—“the great historical”: P, 725.
274—“aim high”: P, 689.
274—“in the old way”: P, 555.
274—“a chance for”: P, 736.
274—“It’s dishonourable”: P, 744.
275—“malignant”: P, 743.
275—“pure mind”: P, 749.
275—“some one else’s wife” . . . “property”: P, 750–51.
276—“I have watched”: P, 752.
276—“no longer the lover”: P, 751.
277—The critic Arnold Kettle: See his chapter on the Portrait in An Introduction to the English Novel, vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1953).
278—“a high door”: P, 756.
279—“dull un-reverenced tool”: P, 759.
279—“your cousin” . . . “match”: P, 766.
CHAPTER 22: WORKING IN THE DARK
280—“despite the constant”: N, 232.
281—“local” . . . “New England”: N, 19.
281—“down to the deep”: Diary of Alice James, 230. See Jean Strouse’s Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) for details of her relationship with Katherine Loring.
282—“dishabituated to the”: CS2, 246.
284—“inexplicable injury”: To William Dean Howells, 2 January 1888. For James’s earnings, see Anesko, Friction with the Market.
284—“anyone to be”: E3, 211.
285—“shrinking opportunity”: CS4, 337.
285—“last manner”: CS4, 350.
285—“second chance” . . . “of art”: CS4, 355.
286—“flooded with light”: To William James, 9 March 1886.
286—“of about the length”: To William James, 1 October 1887.
287—“half a dozen”: N, 52. Edel’s biography remains the best source for details of James’s theatrical career; see also his edition of the Complete Plays of Henry James (1949) with its introductions to each work.
288—“pure situation”: N, 53.
289—“dip my pen”: N, 77.
289—“the quantity of tailoring”: E4, 26.
290—“repulsive and fatuous”: To Isabella Stewart Gardner, 23 January 1882.
290—“clumsy, feeble” . . . “a success”: To Mr. and Mrs. William James, 2 February 1895.
290—“the last” . . . “y’are”: E4, 78.
291—“audible defeat”: Ibid.
291—“an abominable quarter”: To William James, 9 January 1895.
292—“need say” . . . “I will”: N, 109.
CHAPTER 23: THE SECOND CHANCE
294—“march of an action”: N, 167.
295—“denounced”: To Edmund Gosse, 28 August 1896.
296—“long-unassuaged desire”: To Mrs. William James, 1 December 1897.
296—“not too-delusive”: Ibid.
297—“wide, sheep-studded greenness”: E4, 160.
298—“come back next”: To Hendrik Andersen, 7 September 1899.
298—“without thinking”: Ibid.
298—“their bellies and bottoms”: To Hendrik Andersen, 31 May 1906.
299—“squalid violence”: To William James, 26 April 1895.
299—“absolutely holding”: To W. Morton Fullerton, 2 October 1900.
300—“pendulous” . . . “two stockings”: Max Beerbohm, “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” in A Christmas Garland (London: Heinemann, 1912).
301—“It wasn’t till” . . . “great decorated surface”: The Golden Bowl, in Henry James, Novels, 1903–1911 (New York: Library of America, 2010), 733. My account of James’s late style is indebted to Ian Watt’s classic “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors,” Essays in Criticism (1960), and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s introduction to the most recent (2009) Penguin edition of The Golden Bowl.
302—“apertures and outlooks”: Ibid.
302—Many critics: F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (1944); Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness (1962); Laurence Holland, The Expense of Vision (1964).
302—“people’s moral scheme”: LC2, 1312.
305—“hugely and ingeniously” . . . “molehill”: To Sarah Butler Wister, 21 December 1902.
306—“steel-souled”: CTW1, 418.
306—“expensively provisional”: CTW1, 420.
306—“distressful, inevitable waste”: CTW1, 540.
306—“the moral identity” . . . “point of view”: CTW1, 525–26.
307—“triumph of the superficial”: CTW1, 736.
307—“Do New York!” . . . “waits for”: To Edith Wharton, 20 August 1902.
307—“Would You Care”: Quoted in Home, Henry James and Revision.
308—“as to expression” . . . “native city”: To Charles Scribner’s Sons, 30 July 1905.
CHAPTER 24: ENDGAME
309—“rushing hotels”: CTW1, 689.
309—“hot-looking stars”: CTW1, 710.
310—“filthily”: To Brander Matthews, 24 March 1915.
310—“fit for appearance”: Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, 40.
310—“values implicit”: Ibid., 42.
310—“incapable of stupidity”: PNY, 183.
311—“she grew impatient”: P, 777.
311—“nervous and scared”: PNY, 560.
311—“wide brown rooms”: P, 777.
311—in the first systematic study: F. O. Matthiessen, “The Painter’s Sponge and Varnish Bottle,” in Henry James: The Major Phase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944). Reprinted in Bamberg.
311—“private thrill”: PNY, 263.
311—“time and the weather”: LC2, 1045.
312—“a few buried”: LC2, 1046.
312—“latent”: LC2, 1335.
312—“the march of”: LC2, 1329.
312—“the inner life”: Nina Baym, in Bamberg, 620.
313—“Are you going” . . . “is over”: P, 785.
313—“a scene that”: P, 773.
313—“life would be”: P, 769.
314—“very bad” . . . “of me”: P, 781–82.
314—Kant’s idea of the categorical imperative: The standard account of Kant’s relevance to the novel belongs to William Gass, “The High Brutality of Good Intentions,” Accent 18 (Winter 1958). Reprinted in Bamberg. My quotation from the philosopher is drawn from Gass.
314—his secondary characters: See Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
316—“have all eternity”: P, 783.
316—“lost all her shame”: P, 784.
316—“I never thanked”: P, 784.
316—“that was not” . . . “ruined”: P, 785.
317—“I shall be”: P, 784.
318—“a sort of”: To William Dean Howells, 17 August 1908.
318—“self-occupied”: LFL, 422; the friend in question was Charles Eliot Norton’s daughter Sally.
319—October 1908 his first royalty statement. James notes the figure in a letter to J. B. Pinker, 1 April 1909.
319—“black and heavy”: To William Dean Howells, 27 May 1910.
320—“the frustration of all”: E5, 440.
320—“William cannot”: E5, 442.
320—“Bad day[s]”: N, 314–15.
320—“wholly unfit”: To Edith Wharton, 10 June 1910.
321—morphine and milk: For details of William’s death, see Richardson, William James, 520.
321—“His extinction” . . . “pride”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 2 September 1910.
321—“ramification of old”: To Henry James III, 16 July 1912.
321—“difficult & unprecedented”: To Mrs. William James, 13 November 1911.
321—“I recover it”: A, 207.
322—“the past” . . . “memories”: To Henry Adams, 21 March 1914.
322—“undo everything”: To Rhoda Broughton, 10 August 1914.
322—“what the treacherous”: To Howard Sturgis, 4 August 1914.
323—“attachment and devotion”: To H. H. Asquith, 28 June 1915.
323—“bad sick week”: To Edmund Gosse, 25 August 1915.
323—“a regular hell”: To Hugh Walpole, 13 November 1915.
324—“sketchy state” . . . “sister”: For what is called the “Deathbed Dictation,” see N, 581ff.
324—“over the counterpane”: E5, 559.
324—“a dim, hovering” . . . “nothing”: P, 787.
325—“lying on”: Ibid.
325—“postponing, closing” . . . “obligations”: P, 789.
325—“Lady Flora”: P, 780.
326—“something important” . . . “purpose”: P, 794.
326—“that ghastly form”: P, 797.
326—“the world is all”: P, 798.
327—“The world is very small”: Ibid.
327—“to get away” . . . “feet”: P, 797.
327—“the confusion” . . . “free”: P, 799.
327—“but she knew”: Ibid.
328—“this was different” . . . “strange”: PNY, 580.
328—Goodwood’s kiss is no longer: PNY, 581. The best account of Isabel’s relation to sexual passion, and of the novel’s conclusion as well, belongs to Dorothea Krook. See also Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
331—“he looked up at her”: P, 800.
331—“liaison with her rejected lover”: Hutton in Gard.
331—“with an end”: Oliphant in Bamberg.
331—“feels the full force”: N, 15. James’s 1883 words about the ending were recorded in a copy of the novel by its owner. See Supino, Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue, 135.
331—“only to guess”: PNY, 582.
332—“started for Rome”: P, 800.
332—“obvious criticism”: N, 15.
332—“Really, universally”: LC1, 1041.
333—“complete in itself”: N, 15.
333—“all too faint”: To A. C. Benson, 11 March 1898.
333—“Nothing is my”: To Jane Hill, 15 June 1879.
333—“raise the individual”: Henry James, “London Pictures,” in The Painter’s Eye, 213.
334—“there is no greater”: “John S. Sargent,” in The Painter’s Eye, 227–28.
334—“There is really too much to say”: PNY, 17.