Editing Henry James (section)

===Sexuality===
James regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and after settling in London, proclaimed himself "a bachelor". [[F. W. Dupee]], in several volumes on the James family, originated the theory that he had been in love with his cousin, Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism&nbsp;... was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir, ''A Small Boy and Others,'' recounting a dream of a Napoleonic image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled.<ref>Dupee (1949){{clarify|reason=What book is this? I'm not finding it in the list of references|date=January 2014}}</ref><ref name="Dupee 1951">Dupee (1951)</ref>

Between 1953 and 1972, [[Leon Edel]] wrote a major five-volume biography of James, which used unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained the permission of James's family. Edel's portrayal of James included the suggestion he was celibate, a view first propounded by critic [[Saul Rosenzweig]] in 1943.<ref>Graham, Wendy "Henry James's Twarted Love", Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 10</ref> In 1996, Sheldon M. Novick published ''Henry James: The Young Master'', followed by ''Henry James: The Mature Master'' (2007). The first book "caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles"<ref name="auto">{{cite news|last=Leavitt|first=David|author-link=David Leavitt|title=A Beast in the Jungle|date=23 December 2007|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/books/review/Leavitt2-t.html|work=[[The New York Times]]|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170519044221/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/books/review/Leavitt2-t.html|archive-date=19 May 2017}}</ref> as it challenged the previous received notion of celibacy, a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was nonexistent. Novick also criticised Edel for following the discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."<ref name="auto"/> The difference of opinion erupted in a series of exchanges between Edel (and later [[Fred Kaplan (biographer)|Fred Kaplan]] filling in for Edel) and Novick, which were published by the online magazine ''[[Slate (magazine)|Slate]]'', with Novick arguing that even the suggestion of celibacy went against James's own injunction "live!"—not "fantasize!"<ref>{{cite magazine|title= Henry James' Love Life|magazine= [[Slate (magazine)|Slate]]|date= 24 January 1997|url= https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/01/henry-james-love-life-8.html|access-date=29 May 2021}}</ref>

A letter James wrote in old age to [[Hugh Walpole]] has been cited as an explicit statement of this. Walpole confessed to him of indulging in "high jinks", and James wrote a reply endorsing it: "We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours & mine, what we are talking about—& the only way to know it is to have lived & loved & cursed & floundered & enjoyed & suffered—I don't think I regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth".<ref>Leavitt, David, 'A Beast in the Jungle', ''The New York Times'', 23 December 2007</ref>

The interpretation of James as living a less austere emotional life has been subsequently explored by other scholars.<ref>Graham, Wendy "Henry James's Thwarted Love"; Bradley, John "Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire"; Haralson, Eric "Henry James and Queer Modernity".</ref> The often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship has also been the subject of studies.<ref>Anesko, Michael "Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship", Stanford University Press</ref> Author [[Colm Tóibín]] has said that [[Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick]]'s ''Epistemology of the Closet'' made a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read as a homosexual writer whose desire to keep his sexuality a secret shaped his layered style and dramatic artistry. According to Tóibín, such a reading "removed James from the realm of [[dead white male]]s who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary."<ref>{{cite news|first=Colm|last=Tóibín|author-link=Colm Tóibín|title=How Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet|work=[[The Guardian]]|date=20 February 2016|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/colm-toibin-how-henry-james-family-tried-to-keep-him-in-the-closet|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170528114825/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/colm-toibin-how-henry-james-family-tried-to-keep-him-in-the-closet|archive-date=28 May 2017}}</ref>

James's letters to expatriate American sculptor [[Hendrik Christian Andersen]] have attracted particular attention. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of 6 May 1904, to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry".<ref>Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley, eds. (1994), p. 271.</ref><ref>Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley, eds. (1997), ''William and Henry James: Selected Letters'', The University Press of Virginia, p. 447.</ref> How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers,<ref name="Edel pp. 306-316">Edel, 306–316 {{clarify|reason=What is the Edel book that this refers to?|date=January 2014}}</ref> but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasierotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment."<ref>Zorzi (2004)</ref>

His numerous letters to the many young [[homosexual men]] among his close male friends are more forthcoming. To his homosexual friend [[Howard Sturgis]], James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile, I can only try to live without you."<ref>{{harvp|Gunter|Jobe|2001}}</ref> In another letter Sturgis, following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two".<ref>{{harvp|Gunter|Jobe|2001|p=125}}</ref> In letters to Hugh Walpole, he pursues convoluted jokes and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who "paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well-meaning old trunk".<ref>{{harvp|Gunter|Jobe|2001|p=179}}</ref> His letters to [[Walter Van Rensselaer Berry|Walter Berry]] printed by the [[Black Sun Press]] have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism.<ref>''Letters of Henry James to Walter Berry'', Black Sun Press (1928).</ref>

However, James corresponded in equally extravagant language with his many female friends, writing, for example, to fellow novelist [[Lucy Clifford]]: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others."<ref>Demoor and Chisholm (1999) p. 79</ref> To his New York friend [[Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones]]: "Dearest Mary Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me wonder if poor unconscious & doting old Célimare [Jones's pet name for James] has 'done' anything, in some dark somnambulism of the spirit, which has&nbsp;... given you a bad moment, or a wrong impression, or a 'colourable pretext'&nbsp;... However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal ''intimes'' hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life&nbsp;..."<ref>{{harvp|Gunter|2000|p=146}}</ref> His long friendship with American novelist [[Constance Fenimore Woolson]], in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by [[Lyndall Gordon]]. Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers have objected to Edel's account.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Torsney |first=Cheryl B. |title=Constance Fenimore Woolson: the grief of artistry |date=1989 |publisher=University of Georgia Press |isbn=978-0-8203-1101-2 |location=Athens |pages=15}}</ref>