to New York, in a fit of disdain over the way the city’s “oppressive” economic growth has lowered the quality of life.
1882 James travels to Washington, D.C., where he briefly meets Oscar Wilde.
1886 James publishes the first novels of his middle period: The Bostonians, the story of a struggle between a southern conser vative and an embittered suffragist, and The Princess Casamassima, an exploration of the personal dangers involved in taking up anarchism and revolution.
1888 James publishes the short novel The Aspem Papers, about a man who woos the custodian of letters by a poet he idolizes.
1889 Psychologically and financially depressed by the failure of The Bostonians, James shifts his focus to playwriting for the next six years.
1890 He publishes The Tragic Muse, about art and theater in London and Paris. His brother William publishes his ground breaking and influential Principles of Psychology, in which pragmatism and “radical empiricism” are key elements.
1891 James’s dramatization of The American fares moderately well.
1895 James’s first dramatic work written as such, Guy Domville, is booed by the opening-night audience and receives mostly negative reviews, though George Bernard Shaw praises it.
After little success with playwriting, James returns to writing fiction. The United States increases its involvement in a con flict between Spain and Cuba, which wants independence from Spanish rule. James opposes this involvement, calling it “none of our business.”
1897 He publishes What Maisie Knew, the story of a preadolescent girl who must choose between her parents and a governess.
1898 James publishes the ghost story The Turn of the Screw. He purchases Lamb House, in Rye, England, where he will write his last novels and letters. The Spanish-American War takes place.
1900 During the final stage of his writing career, James’s style be comes increasingly complex and convoluted. Over the next few years, he produces what are often considered his greatest works.
1902 He publishes The Wings of the Dove, about a group of peo ple who scheme to inherit a dying woman’s fortune.
1903 The Ambassadors, about an American suspicious of European ways who is won over by life in Paris, is published, as is “The Beast in the Jungle,” a story of a man who believes he is in tended for something remarkable. In London, James meets Edith Wharton.
1904 His novel of adultery The Golden Bowl is published. He trav els to the United States to oversee the production of a re vised collection of his most important works of fiction.
1907 James publishes The American Scene, his observations on what America has become. Publication of the twenty-six vol umes of the revised fiction collection, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, begins; it will continue until 1917.
1908 James publishes the story “The Jolly Corner,” an oblique commentary on the America he has left behind.
1910 In January James becomes very ill. He is nursed by his siblings Alice and William, with whom he returns to Cambridge. He visits New York, where he receives psychiatric care.
1911 In August he returns to England.
1914 James begins work on two novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, which he will not complete before his death.
1915 James’s health deteriorates. He becomes a British subject.
1916 On New Year’s Day he receives the Order of Merit. On Feb ruary 28 Henry James dies. His ashes are taken to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be buried in American soil.
1917 The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past are published in their unfinished state.
INTRODUCTION
“It is, I think, an indisputable fact,” Henry James remarked in 1879, “that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world.” This striking claim was delivered the year his first success, Daisy Miller: A Study, was published in book form, and a year prior to the serial publication of his quintessentially New York novel, Washington Square (published in book form in 1881); it highlights James’s fascination with his native land and equally reveals his own share in its self-consciousness. As James remarked in Hawthorne (1879), his extended study of the writer, the “experimental element” had not “as yet entirely dropped out of the great political undertaking” of the United States, and as a result, Americans were singularly “conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family.” Like adolescents exiled to the children’s table at some big family celebration, Americans felt themselves the victims of an international “conspiracy to undervalue them.” As James noted, they had been “placed on the circumference of the circle of civilization rather than at the centre,” a