Henry James
The Imagination of Genius, A Biography
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A stunning biography of the magisterial author behind The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors
Henry James is an absorbing portrait of one of the most complex and influential nineteenth-century American writers. Fred Kaplan examines James’s brilliant and troubled family—from his brother, a famous psychologist, to his sister, who fought with mental illness—and charts its influence on the development of the artist and his work. The biography includes a fascinating account of James’s life as an American expatriate in Europe, and his friendships with Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad. Compressing a wealth of research into one engrossing and richly detailed volume, Henry James is a compelling exploration of its subject.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Similar in its emotional complexity and cunning insights to James's own novels, this remarkably vivid biography offers a nuanced portrait of the author as an ambivalent Victorian, a voluntary expatriate who paid the price for his independence in lonelliness and alienation. As portrayed here, James (1843-1916) took ``the feminine role in his sexual identity, his social life, and his fiction.'' Generally repressing his homoerotic desires--though he fell in love with numerous men--James was haunted by the fear that his renunciation of sexuality had kept him from experiencing life's depths . Kaplan, biographer of Dickens and Carlyle and professor of English at Queens College in New York City, illuminates the psychodynamics of James's troubled family: his father, an energetic handicapped philosopher, starved himself to death; Alice, the novelist's mentally ill sister, looked to brothers William and Henry as husband substitutes. Kaplan persuasively shows how James projected his inner conflicts and obsession with repressed sexuality onto his fictional characters. Photos.
