A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art
If you thought that previous biographers of Henry James had exhausted the field, think again. Lyndall Gordon--whose earlier work includes lives of T. S. Eliot and Charlotte Brontë--narrows her focus to examine the relationships James had with two women, a decade apart. The first was his cousin, Minny Temple, who contracted tuberculosis when she was 22. As she neared death, the vivacious, intelligent young woman dropped discreet hints to James in her correspondence that she would love to accompany him to Europe. He withdrew, and she died in 1870, only 24 years old. He would later use her as the template for such characters as Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer. Then, in 1880, James met the commercially successful author Constance Fenimore Woolson. During their 14-year relationship, the two not only inspired various characters in each other's fiction, but, Gordon suggests, Woolson set James on the path of writing metaphorically about the artist's life. But their relationship ended badly: he wrote a condescending essay about her inHarper's, which ensured her literary downfall; she ultimately fell to her death from a bedroom window (most likely, based on the evidence Gordon assembles, of her own volition).A Private Life of Henry Jamesoffers an unflinching look at its subject, demolishing the myth of James's solitary genius while respecting the complexity of his circumstances.