Editing Henry James (section)

===Style and themes===
James is one of the major figures of [[wikt:transatlantic|trans-Atlantic]] literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from the [[Old World]] (Europe), embodying a feudal civilisation that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the [[New World]] (United States), where people are often brash, open, and [[assertiveness|assertive]], and embody the virtues of the new American society—particularly personal freedom and a more exacting moral character. James explores this [[clash of personalities]] and cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly.

His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse, and as his secretary [[Theodora Bosanquet]] remarked in her monograph ''Henry James at Work'':
[[File:Portrait of Henry James 1913.jpg|thumb|upright|''Portrait of Henry James'', charcoal drawing by [[John Singer Sargent]] (1912)]]

{{blockquote|text=When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light&nbsp;... His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest [[Political freedom|freedom]] of development, unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.<ref>Bosanquet (1982) pp. 275–276</ref>}}

[[Philip Guedalla]] jokingly described three phases in the development of James's prose: "James I, James II, and The Old Pretender,"<ref>[[Guedalla, Philip]] (1921). [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88538 ''Supers & Supermen: Studies in Politics, History and Letters''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150925054942/https://books.google.com/books?id=E0luAAAAMAAJ&PA45 |date=25 September 2015 }}, p. 45. Alfred A. Knopf. Retrieved 27 January 2014.</ref> and observers do often group his works of fiction into three periods. In his apprentice years, culminating with the masterwork ''The Portrait of a Lady'', his style was simple and direct (by the standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented widely with forms and methods, generally narrating from a conventionally omniscient point of view. Plots generally concern romance, except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period. In the second period, as noted above, he abandoned the serialised novel and from 1890 to about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. Finally, in his third and last period he returned to the long, serialised novel. Beginning in the second period, but most noticeably in the third; he increasingly abandoned direct statement in favour of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive imagery. Single paragraphs began to run for page after page, in which an initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, and verbs would be deferred and then preceded by a series of adverbs. The overall effect could be a vivid evocation of a scene as perceived by a sensitive observer. It has been debated whether this change of style was engendered by James's shifting from writing to dictating to a typist,<ref>Miller, James E. Jr., ed. (1972). [https://books.google.com/books?id=lANfu4yo0P4C&pg=PA268 ''Theory of Fiction: Henry James''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151002060937/https://books.google.com/books?id=lANfu4yo0P4C&pg=PA268 |date=2 October 2015 }}, pp. 268–69. University of Nebraska Press. Retrieved 27 February 2014.</ref> a change made during the composition of ''[[What Maisie Knew]].''<ref>Edel, Leon, ed. (1984). [https://books.google.com/books?id=Ytg3CfAmV0EC&pg=PA4 ''Henry James: Letters, Vol. IV, 1895–1916''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151002062351/https://books.google.com/books?id=Ytg3CfAmV0EC&pg=PA4 |date=2 October 2015 }}, p. 4. Harvard University Press. Retrieved 17 February 2014.</ref>

In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James's later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th-century fiction.<ref>Wagenknecht (1983).</ref>{{refn|See James's prefaces, Horne's study of his revisions for ''The New York Edition,'' Edward Wagenknecht's ''The Novels of Henry James'' (1983) among many discussions of the changes in James's narrative technique and style over the course of his career.|group=nb}} Indeed, he might have influenced stream-of-consciousness writers such as [[Virginia Woolf]], who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them.<ref>Woolf (March 2003) pp. 33, 39–40, 58, 86, 215, 301, 351.</ref> Both contemporary and modern readers have found the late style difficult and unnecessary; his friend [[Edith Wharton]], who admired him greatly, said that some passages in his work were all but incomprehensible.<ref>Edith Wharton (1925) pp. 90–91</ref> James was harshly portrayed by [[H.&nbsp;G. Wells]] as a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that had got into a corner of its cage.<ref>H. G. Wells, Boon (1915) p. 101.</ref> The "late James" style was ably parodied by [[Max Beerbohm]] in "The Mote in the Middle Distance".<ref>Beerbohm, Max (1922).  "The Mote in the Middle Distance." In [https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_mE5aAAAAMAAJ/page/n7 <!-- pg=1 --> ''A Christmas Garland''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150925015008/https://books.google.com/books?id=mE5aAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1 |date=25 September 2015 }}, p. 1. E.P. Dutton & Company. Retrieved 27 January 2014.</ref>

More important for his work overall may have been his position as an [[expatriate]], and in other ways an outsider, living in Europe. While he came from middle-class and provincial beginnings (seen from the perspective of European polite society), he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society, and the settings of his fiction range from working-class to [[aristocracy|aristocratic]], and often describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to make their way in European capitals. He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends.<ref>{{Cite web |last=James |first=Henry |date=1908 |title=Preface to volume 10 of the New York edition (containing: The spoils of Poynton; A London life; The chaperon) |url=http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/text10_inframe.htm |access-date=15 July 2024 |archive-date=13 October 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061013003155/http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/text10_inframe.htm |url-status=bot: unknown }}</ref>{{refn|James's prefaces to the ''[[New York Edition]]'' of his fiction often discuss such origins for his stories. See, for instance, the preface to ''[[The Spoils of Poynton]]''.|group=nb}} He worked for a living, however, and lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the common bonds of masculine society. He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of [[Victorian era]] Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality.<ref name="Edel 1984 v.4 p. 170">Leon Edel (1984) volume 4, p. 170</ref>{{refn|James himself noted his "outsider" status. In a letter of 2 October 1901, to W. Morton Fullerton, James talked of the "essential loneliness of my life" as "the deepest thing" about him.<ref name="Edel 1984 v.4 p. 170" />|group=nb}} Edmund Wilson compared James's objectivity to Shakespeare's:

{{blockquote|text=One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—[[Jean Racine|Racine]] and [[Molière]], whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]], when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not, like [[Charles Dickens|Dickens]] and [[Thomas Hardy|Hardy]], writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like [[Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]], nor prophets like [[Leo Tolstoy|Tolstoy]]: they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.<ref>Dabney (1983) pp. 128–129</ref>}}

Many of James's stories may also be seen as psychological thought experiments about selection. In his preface to the New York edition of ''The American'', James describes the development of the story in his mind as exactly such: the "situation" of an American, "some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot..." with the focus of the story being on the response of this wronged man.<ref>The American, 1907, p. vi–vii</ref> ''The Portrait of a Lady'' may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman suddenly becomes very rich. In many of his tales, characters seem to exemplify alternative futures and possibilities, as most markedly in "[[The Jolly Corner]]", in which the protagonist and a ghost-doppelganger live alternative American and European lives; and in others, like ''The Ambassadors,'' an older James seems fondly to regard his own younger self facing a crucial moment.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bell |first=Millicent |title=Meaning in Henry James |date=1991 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-55762-8 |location=Cambridge, Mass |pages=324}}</ref>