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. Oxford University Press.
he was hugely influential as a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. His also wrote plays, which, however, were unsuccessful on stage.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Margaret Oliphant
It is almost impossible to calculate MO 's lifetime earnings as an author: she used various different publishers, and borrowed money from them as well as waiting to be paid. But it seems from the...
Literary responses Fanny Kemble
Henry James remarked on her achievement: To write one's first novel at the age of eighty is a thing which could have happened only to a woman who has done everything, all her life, just...
Literary responses Mary Augusta Ward
Henry James disliked this tale. It was well received by reviewers; the Critic hailed MAW as the greatest woman novelist of her day.
Sutherland, John. Mrs. Humphry Ward. Clarendon Press.
151
Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. New York University Press.
167
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 Mary Augusta Ward
MAW 's meticulous character study and tragic love story is sometimes considered her best novel. It was positively received by George Meredith , Sir J. M. Barrie , and Henry James. James wrote to her...
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 Mary Augusta Ward
James 's admiring response admitted his own irresistible urge to recast the novels of other people. He also opined to MAW that you had done nothing more homogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It...
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 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 <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Moods</span>, 1865”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, pp. 69-73.
73
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, pp. 30-1.
30
Literary responses Mary Lavin
This volume brought ML critical acclaim. R. J. Thompson read it as establishing her position as one of the most artful and perceptive masters of the story form in our day.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
In Ireland, wrote the...
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.
Allardice, Lisa. “Sarah Waters: ’Some of my readers really did hate me. They felt let down’”. theguardian.com.
Hilary Mantel
Literary responses Penelope Lively
Fay Weldon calls this novel James ian . . . in its complexities and its carefulness.
Lively, Penelope. Heat Wave. HarperPerennial.
back cover
Literary responses Beryl Bainbridge
Publishers rejecting the work had called the central characters repulsive beyond belief.
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.
Susannah Clapp has called it as powerful an account of corruption as Henry JamesThe Turn of the Screw . . . . sleek but...
Literary responses Beatrice Harraden
This was BH ' own favourite among her works.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
A review in the New York Times ascribed to it intellectual vivacity, extraordinarily skillful characterization
“Miss Harraden’s New Story”. New York Times.
(balanced with some that was not so good), humour, and...

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