Shirley Kossick
A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES: TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART by Lyndall Gordon (Chatto & Windus)
After Leon Edel’s Pulitzer-winning five- volume biography of Henry James (1953-72) and numerous subsequent studies, it is difficult to believe that anything fresh is left to be said about James. Lyndall Gordon, however, proves this assumption wrong by approaching her subject from an entirely new angle.
While previous biographers have taken note of James’s friendships with his cousin Minny Temple and novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, none has delved deeply into these relationships. In this book, Gordon concentrates on a searching examination of the effect on James’s psyche and writing of the two women.
Minny Temple died of tuberculosis at 24, leaving behind what Gordon calls “the mystery of those with promise who die young”. Gordon amply substantiates her contention that Minny’s presence – “as prototypical American girl” – informs and shapes James’s creation of such fictional heroines as Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer and, especially, Milly Theale.
When Woolson committed suicide in Venice in 1894, James was devastated. He seemed, too, to experience a certain guilt, possibly arising from his failure to fulfil the expectations of this “intimate friendship”.
This is a work of formidable scholarship to which so brief a comment can hardly do justice. It is also absorbing – even exciting.