05-04-2025
Why you shouldn't ignore Henry James
Who reads Henry James today? His name seems to float in the ether, his corpus reduced in bookshops to a few familiar titles – if they even have them in stock. You'll often do well to find more than The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw. And though 20th-century critics installed him as a colossus of the canon, James never really held a candle to Charles Dickens's popularity, so instantly evocative of Christmas and Victorian urchins, much less to the comic ecstasy that continues to surround the Jane Austen cult.
This vanishing is apt, given how fond James was of a good ghost story. But there are advantages to being a ghost. If James doesn't penetrate the public consciousness in the way of other literary giants, he suffuses it. The value of the novel – its future as an art form – preoccupied him, so he did what any artist is duty-bound to do under the circumstances. James, who would be known in his lifetime as the Master, raised the standard. His writing formed the brickwork by which the road to literary modernism was paved.
Listen to TS Eliot: 'James did not provide us with 'ideas', but with another world of thought and feeling.' Listen to Spender: 'What James did in fact revolutionise is the manner of presenting the scene in the novel.' Listen to Woolf on James's ghost stories: 'We must admit that Henry James has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.' In his wake, he has left a long and impressive gathering of admirers that extend from James Baldwin, who kept a picture of the author above his writing desk, to John Banville, who applied his own masterful pen to write out the fate of one of James's best-known characters, Isabel Archer (from The Portrait of a Lady), in his 2017 novel Mrs Osmond.
Even so, there may seem little incentive for the modern reader to explore James's non-fiction. After all, criticism in an author's career tends more often than not to be an afterthought, the equivalent of gilding and cornices in the palatial museum of a writer's repertoire. But James was always an exception, and, over a century later, his critic's eye holds up a mirror that is still startling in its clarity.
Nowhere is this better shown than Peter Brooks's new book, Henry James Comes Home (★★★★★), an illuminating exploration of the author's 10-month trip in 1904 from Britain – his home, on and off, since the 1870s – to the land of his birth. That journey culminated in the controversial travelogue, The American Scene. Tracing the steps of the now-mature Master, Henry James Comes Home forms a poignant counterpart to Brooks's 2007 work Henry James Goes to Paris, which followed the young novelist as he navigated his course among some of the brightest stars in the literary firmament.
