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American Literature: Realism and Naturalism Period: James

A research topic guide covering the realism and naturalism periods of American literature.

Henry James

Henry James (1843 - 1916) was an American-British author. His most well known works include The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Ambassadors. 

Research & Reference

Streaming Media

Author's Works & Perspectives

The Wings of the Dove

Confronting a Bronzino portrait in an English country house, a young American heiress comes face to face with her own predicament. For Milly Theale, who seems to have the world before her and at her feet, is fatally ill. Eager for life, eager for love, she embarks on her European adventure, warming to the admiration of her new friends Kate Croy and Merton Densher. But Merton and Kate are secretly engaged, and come to see in this angel with a thumping bank account as a solution to their own problems. For the remarkable Kate, scheming, passionate, poetic, also wants to live...This edition of James's poignant and dramatic novel is based on the revised New York Edition. The cover pictures the Bronzino portrait which is the focus of the key scene in the book.

Henry James: Complete Stories Vol. 4 1892-1898 (LOA #82)

This Library of America volume is one of five that make available for the first time in new, complete, and authoritative editions the astonishing abundance of invention and unwavering intensity of the aesthetic vision of Henry James as displayed in more than one hundred world-famous stories ranging from brief anecdotes to richly developed novellas. Equally adept at ironic comedy, muted tragedy, and supernatural fantasy, at lively social satire and nuanced portraiture, James in his shorter works explores a staggering variety of situations and emotions. Here are courtships and legacies; the worlds of literature, theater, and the popular press; the paradoxes of temperament and the constraints of custom; the clash of conscience and desire. Stylistically, the stories allowed James to experiment with tones and devices quite different from his novels--dramatic plot twists and surprise endings, swift pacing and ebullient humor. The brilliance of his technical command allowed him to transform the tiniest of suggestions--a fleetingly observed gesture, an anecdote dropped at a dinner party--into fiction remarkable for its lambent surfaces and intricate psychological counterpoint. The twenty-one stories in this volume represent James at the peak of his storytelling powers. Among them are "The Turn of the Screw," one of his most popular works, and a terrifying exercise in psychological horror centering on the corruption of childhood innocence; "The Real Thing," a playful consideration of the illusion of art and the paradoxes of authenticity; "The Figure in the Carpet," "The Death of the Lion," and "The Middle Years," three very different expositions of the mysteries of authorship, embodying some of James's most profound insights into the nature of his own art; "The Altar of the Dead," a somber, ultimately wrenching meditation on the relation of the living to the dead; and "In the Cage," an extended evocation of the inner life of a young woman trapped in a dehumanizing job at a postal-and-telegraph office. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James: Novels 1881-1886

Written in London and Italy between 1879 and 1885, the novels in this Library of America volume portray American women confronting crises of independence and possession. Studies in the exercise of power that marks relations between sexes, classes, and cultures, they show James's special solicitude for the young heroines who occupy the center of his fictional world. Washington Square (1880) examines the life of Catherine Sloper, a plain, sweet, young woman who lives imprisoned by the selfishness of those close to her: her lover, who cares only for her fortu≠ her aunt, who meddles for the sake of romantic intrigue; and her protective father, who repays her adoration with irony and wit. Set in the New York of the 1840s, Washington Square evokes the still-intimate city of James's childhood while presenting a frightening moral lesson in the human consequences of manipulation and indifference. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the story of Isabel Archer, a beautiful, idealistic, and inexperienced American woman who is made wealthy by her uncle at the instigation of her dying cousin. Surrounded by the seductive pleasures of nineteenth-century Europe, she preserves her idealism despite involvement with some who would divert her life to uses of their own--Caspar Goodwood, virile American captain of industry; Lord Warburton, scion of British aristocracy; Gilbert Osmond, connoisseur and collector of beautiful objects; Madame Merle, subtle and charming expatriate of unknown connections; and indomitable Henrietta Stackpole, roving journalist and steadfast friend. James's many-layered masterpiece concerns the perilous American pursuit of individual freedom. The Bostonians (1886) presents an unusual contest for the affections of Verena Tarrant, the lovely, naïve, and pliant daughter of a mesmerist lecturer. She is courted by two cousins: Basil Ransom, an impractical Mississippi landowner now pursuing a meager New York legal practice, and Olive Chancellor, a rich young Boston feminist. Against the richly textured backdrop of Boston and New York society, they enact a drama of confused identity and willful calculation that demonstrates the power and the perils engendered by the refusal of self-knowledge. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James: Literary Criticism Vol. 1

Henry James, renowned as one of the world's great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume and its companion are a fitting testimony to his unprecedented achievement. They offer the only comprehensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, more than one-third of which have never appeared in book form. This first volume focuses especially on his responses to American and English writers; the second volume contains his essays on European literature and the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction. From 1864 until virtually the end of his life, James displayed an astonishing range and catholicity of critical interests, touching on nearly every facet of literature in America, England, and Europe. Here are his most important theoretical essays, including his witty and daring declarations of the novelist's freedom in "The Art of Fiction," "The Future of the Novel," and "The Science of Criticism"--a gently ironic title from a writer who regarded criticism as a form of art. Appreciations of Ralph Waldo Emerson ("I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends"), pungent comments (which he later regretted) on Walt Whitman's "Drum-Taps," and assessments of Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, his friend and admirer William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Francis Parkman, and scores of other American writers are joined, in revealing proximity, to commentaries on nearly every important English writer of fiction (and some poets, such as the Brownings) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These reviews of English writers include James's stunning essay on Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, his provocative discussions of George Eliot, and his tough but appreciative estimates of Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, Rupert Brooke, Ouida, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Also included here is his great essay on Shakespeare's The Tempest. All of these pieces are gathered under the author considered, so that James's supple changes in attitude can be followed across the years. Of particular interest, both critically and biographically, are James's commentaries on Nathaniel Hawthorne, including his still-controversial book-length study of 1879. His estimates of his predecessor's work remain highly debatable, but are perhaps more interesting as evidence of his own feelings about being an American writer of a later and, as he assumed, more complex time. Finally, this volume includes two invaluable collections: his "American Letters" and "London Notes," wherein, with unsurpassed tact and grandeur of mind, he introduces readers of his native and of his adopted country to each other. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.