Henry James (1843 - 1916) |
"I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility"
| Henry James was born in New York City
in 1843. His father, Henry James Sr, was a wealthy man
and a well-known intellectual, whose friends included
Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne. The affluence the family
inherited from his Irish grandfather allowed James to
live in comfort; he never made much money from his
writing. As a young man, James traveled between Europe and America, and studied law at Harvard briefly at the age of nineteen. He published his first short story, A Tragedy of Errors, two years later, and began writing full-time. His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), was written on a voyage through Venice and Paris. During his years in Europe James wrote several novels portraying Americans living abroad. Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and novels for the New York edition of his complete works. Before his death in 1916, he also completed his autobiography, which included A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son Aand Brother (1914) and The Middle Years, which was published posthumously. The novels of Henry James are remarkable for their understanding and sensitively drawn female characters. His main themes were the innocence of the New World in conflict with corruption and wisdom of the Old. Among his masterpieces are Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Wings of The Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors (1903). James's most famous short stories include The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story in which the question of childhood corruption obsesses a governess. James's sexuality has been much discussed; he explained his celibacy by saying that "to be led to the marriage bed is to be dead". He left an autobiographical fragment, Terminations; there is a vast, rather psychoanalytically dated biography by Leon Edel. |
The Turn of the Screw is a novella written by Henry James. It is a ghost story that was originally published in 1898. A nameless governess reports the events of two ghosts who stalk the young children she has charge over.
The Turn of the Screw is a book found in The Swan. It was written by Henry James and originally published in 1898. The book tells the story of a young governess at a remote estate, who slowly comes to realize her young charges are being haunted by the ghosts of their former governess and the valet with whom she was romantically involved.
The heroine becomes more and more convinced that these two ghosts mean harm to the children, and her efforts to protect them end in tragedy. However, the reader is left with the strong impression that the two ghosts were figments of the governess' imagination.
A dramatization of the book was filmed in 1957, under the title The Others, for the US television series Matinee Theatre.
Some useful sites -
http://librivox.org/the-turn-of-the-screw-by-henry-james/ (1. download the entire book, 2. download mp3 and listen to the story)
Terminations is Henry James's most thematically unified collection of stories. Gathered in 1895, and following his fascination with the supernatural in the 1880s, this elegant collection explores the sadness of loss, both physical and spiritual, and finds James at his introspective best, while providing a glimpse of how the author dealt with death in his own life.
The collection consists of four stories: "The Death of the Lion," in which the narrator prepares to write an obituary for a great editor he admired; "The Coxon Fund," where an endowment from a will comes unexpectedly to a seemingly undeserving character; "The Middle Years," a brief glimpse at the public reception of a novel and the private sacrifice it exacted from its author; and "The Altar of the Dead," a moving meditation on finding meaning in life that James wrote in response to the death of a close lady friend.
Terminations reveals a writer preoccupied with the endings of life, expressing his thoughts in prose that is as finely balanced as the most famous of James's work.
Henry James (1843-1916) wrote more than one hundred stories, plays, works of criticism, and novels, including The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl.
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