Description
Book SynopsisHenry James wrote with an imperial elegance of style, whether his subjects were American innocents or European sophisticates, incandescent women or their vigorous suitors. His omniscient eye took in the surfaces of cities, the nuances of speech, dress, and manner, and, above all, the microscopic interactions, hesitancies, betrayals, and self-betrayals that are the true substance of relationships. The entirely new
Portable Henry James provides an unparalleled range of this great body of work: seven major tales, including
Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, The Beast in the Jungle, and The Jolly Corner; a sampling of revisions James made to some of his most famous work; travel writing; literary criticism; correspondences; autobiography; descriptions of the major novels; and parodies by famous contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature
Table of ContentsThe Portable Henry James
Introduction
Chronology
AcknowledgmentsI. Fiction
Daisy Miller: A Study
"Brooksmith"
"The Real Thing"
"The Middle Years"
The Turn of the Screw
"The Beast in the Jungle
"The Jolly Corner"
II. Revisions
Daisy Miller: 1879 and 1909
The Portrait of a Lady: 1881 and 1908
III. Travel
From English Hours
"London at Midsummer"
From Italian Hours
"Two Old Houses and Three Young Women"
"The Saint's Afternoon and Others"
From The American Scene
"The Bowery and Thereabouts"
from "Boston"
"France"
IV. Criticism
On Whitman
"brute sublimity"
On Baudelaire
"This is not Evil...it is simply the nasty!"
From Hawthorne
"No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church"
On Emerson
"salt is wanting"
"The Art of Fiction"
"the chamber of consciousness"
"Try to be one...on whom nothing is lost!"
From "the Question of Our Speech"
"Our national use of the vocal sound, in men and women alike, is slovenly"
From "The Lesson of Balzac"
"plated and burnished and bright"
On Shakespeare
the "absolute value of Style"
From the Preface to Roderick Hudson
"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere"
From the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady
"The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million"
From the Preface to The Tragic Muse
"large loose baggy monsters"
V. Autobiography
The peaches d'antan
from A Small Boy and Others
The dancing teacher Madame Dubreil
from A Small Boy and Others
A daguerreotype taken by Mathew Brady
from A Small Boy and Others
The Galerie d'Apollon
from A Small Boy and Others
An obscure hurt
from Notes of a Son and Brother
The death of Minnie Temple
from Notes of a Son and Brother
At the grave of Alice James
from The Complete Notebooks
VI. Correspondence
A thirteen-year-old in Paris writes to a young friend
To Edgar Van Winkle; 1856
On the Grand Tour
To William James; October 30, 1869
Henry James, expatriate
To the James family; November 1, 1875
The literary scene in Paris
To William Dean Howells; May 28, 1876
Growing fame
To Miss Abbey Alger; November 21, 1881
The friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson
To Robert Louis Stevenson; July 31, 1888
The death of Alice James
To William James; March 8, 1892
The friendship with Hendrik C. Andersen
To Hendrik C. Andersen; February 9, 1902
To Hendrik C. Andersen; February 28, 1902
The death of William James
To Thomas Sergeant Perry; September 2, 1910
To H. G. Wells; September 11, 1910
The publication of Boon, and the break with H. G. Wells
To H. G. Wells; July 6, 1915
To H. G. Wells; July 10, 1915
VII. Definition and Description
An American encounters some aristocrats
from The American
An ambitious young Frenchwoman
from The American
Sarah Bernhardt, the muse of the newspaper
from "The Comedie Francaise in London"
An American education
from The Portrait of a Lady
An American is corrected on what constitutes "the self"
from The Portrait of a Lady
An absolutely unmarried woman
from The Bostonians
Philistine decor
from The Spils of Poynton
The really rich
from The Wings of the Dove
New York identity
from The Wings of the Dove
A Venetian majordomo
from The Wings of the Dove
Like a scene from a Maeterlinck play
from The Wings of the Dove
A private thought
from the Wings of the Dove
The seduction of Europe
from the Ambassadors
A femme du monde
from The Ambassadors
An intimate recollection of a beautiful woman
from The Golden Bowl
Colossal immodesty
from The American Scene
The individual Jew
from The American Scene
New York City Hall
from The American Scene
The absence of penetralia
from The American Scene
New York Power
from The American Scene
American teeth
from The American Scene
A young priest apart from the Roman carnival
from Italian Hours
VIII. Names
IX. Parody
Frank Moore Colby
from "In Darkest James"
Max Beerbohm
" 'The Mote in the Middle Distance,' by H*nry J*mes"
X. Legacy
W.H. Auden
"At the Grave of Henry James"
Joseph Conrad
from "Henry James: An Appreciation"
T.S. Eliot
from "In Memory"
Graham Greene
from "Henry James: The Private Universe"
Ezra Pound
from "Henry James"
Edith Wharton
from A Backward Glance
Virginia Woolf
from "Review of The Letters of Henry James"
Suggestions for Further Reading
Selected Bibliography
