Henry James

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Standard Name: James, Henry
HJ (who began publishing in 1871 and continued into the twentieth century) left his native USA to settle in England early in his writing career. Known for his extreme subtlety, verging at times on obscurity,
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Sixth edition, Oxford University Press, 2000.
he was hugely influential as a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. His also wrote plays, which, however, were unsuccessful on stage.
Henry James in a black-and-white photo by William M. Vander Weyde. James is seen full-face, looking forward and to the left, wearing a formal suit, with bald head slightly tilted.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Lucas Malet
The Times review found the subject-matter of these stories derivative: now of Henry James , now of E. M. Forster , now of unnamed murder-mystery writers.She likes a revolver shot, not for any mystery...
Literary responses Julia Constance Fletcher
The Athenæum thought the Italian stories more tragic, more real and lively. It complained that Fleming (like Henry James , and oddly when most Americans are so energetic and decisive) chose to write about such...
Literary responses Louisa May Alcott
In a review of Moods, Henry James panned LMA 's ignorance of human nature, but did acknowledge a degree of cleverness in the author and a great deal of beauty in the writing.
James, Henry. “Review of Moods, 1865”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, 1984, pp. 69-73.
73
Literary responses Patricia Highsmith
Critic Bob Wake discusses Highsmith's complex point-of-view techniques—a literary style begun by Henry James —and her modelling The Talented Mr Ripley on his novel The Ambassadors (1903). He notes her humorous plays on the James...
Literary responses Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The New York Times called this one of the three collaborators' best films as well as one of the best adaptations of a major literary work ever to come onto the screen.
qtd. in
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
137
This film...
Literary responses Willa Cather
This volume was badly received. Cather sent a copy to Henry James , whom at this date she much admired. As Tillie Olsen later pointed out indignantly, he never replied. To an enquiry from a...
Literary responses Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Updike again complained about RPJ 's refusal of sympathy to her characters. Robert Towers went further: linking this with Jhabvala's gender and (British) nationality, he accused her of revelling in her characters' discomfiture and degradation...
Literary responses Sara Jeannette Duncan
SJD sent a copy of this work to Henry James , who replied: I think your drama lacks a little line—bony structure and palpable, as it were, tense cord—on which to string the pearls of...
Literary responses Alice Meynell
This collection moved the Times Literary Supplement to declare that its delicacy—of scrupulousness, balance, fineness, skill—is as rare in life and in art as ever it was.
qtd. in
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981.
222-3
Dixon Scott wrote in the Liverpool Courier...
Literary responses Anita Brookner
There was some astonishment in the media when this novel won the Booker Prize (although it was up against J. G. Ballard 's Empire of the Sun. The book itself significantly boosted AB 's literary...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
Reviews were extremely positive. Most expressed a sense of loss to English letters at EG 's recent death, and compared Wives and Daughters to her other well-loved book, Cranford. The Athenæum likened the style...
Literary responses Anita Brookner
Reviewer Dinah Birch discerned in this book and in AB 's work generally severe taste conceal[ing] an expansively James ian aestheticism.
Birch, Dinah. “Wintry Lessons”. London Review of Books, 27 June 2002, pp. 30-1.
30
Literary responses Sarah Waters
Waters says that while some of her lesbian readers felt angry or let down by her writing a book without lesbian content, this was the book that my 10-year-old self was destined to write.
qtd. in
Allardice, Lisa. “Sarah Waters: ’Some of my readers really did hate me. They felt let down’”. theguardian.com, 15 Sept. 2018.
Hilary Mantel
Literary responses Beryl Bainbridge
Publishers rejecting the work had called the central characters repulsive beyond belief.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Susannah Clapp has called it as powerful an account of corruption as Henry JamesThe Turn of the Screw . . . . sleek but...
Literary responses George Egerton
Both lauded and lambasted, GE was a sexually radical writer who challenged English reserve and literary reticence through the directness of her treatment of female desire.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman. Manchester University Press, 1997.
188
But after all her popularity and notoriety at...

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