Henry James and Women Writers

Session Coordinator: Geraldine Murphy

Department of English, NAC 6/219

City College, CUNY

160 Convent Avenue

New York, NY 10031

gmurphy@ccny.cuny.edu

gmurphy1066@yahoo.com

“Women Who Talk Too Much: Henry James and the Improvisatrice”

Henry James had a deep affection for the French Romantic writers of the “visitable past,” an affection evident in his essays on George Sand. If her novels no longer spoke to him as Balzac’s did, Sand nevertheless was an inspired romancer who “told stories as a nightingale sings.” About the most famous improvisatrice of the nineteenth century, however, James was more ambivalent. In the thousands of pages of literary criticism that he published in his long career, there are only a few references to Madame de Stael. He dutifully observed that she “discovered Germany” for the French and that she was one of France’s “three female writers of the first rank,” but he clearly found Coppet more charming than its mistress. James’s rich and extensive fictional allusions to de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy (from his early story “At Isella” to The Bostonians) are similarly mixed, suggesting an investment in the topos of Romantic Italy and a corresponding dislike for the excesses of female Byronism. With reference to Margaret Fuller (“the Yankee Corinna”) and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story, “At the Chateau of Corinne,” I argue that, for James, the myth of Corinne threatens not only gender conventions but also—and especially—Jamesian modes of literary production. James was an observer, one on whom nothing was lost; where he accumulated, de Stael and Fuller expended. Their genius for talking, in short, was a threat to their writing.

Geraldine Murphy

City College, CUNY

gmurphy@ccny.cuny.edu

“Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne”

It has always struck me as rather odd that Sharon Dean sees James’s 1887 essay on Woolson as championing her fiction. Lyndall Gordon’s assessment in A Private Life of Henry James is surely nearer the mark: “‘Miss Woolson’ was a calculated betrayal; it carried an armoury of stings in its velvet glove” (213). Moreover, James placed the essay in Harper’s, the journal in which Anne had been serialized and which attracted some of Woolson’s most devoted readers. “The work of Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” James begins, “is an excellent example of the way in which the door stands open between the personal life of American women and the immeasurable world of print”; that “immeasurable” is designed, of course, to have a rather overwhelming force; and there is never any indication as to whether Woolson has walked through this particular “door,” or any hint as to the direction, in or out, James regards her as having taken. This paper measures James’s attack on Woolson against the power of Woolson’s novel and also involves a re-assessment of the broader relationship between the two writers. If the eventual destiny of Anne has been one of comparative oblivion, its immediate fate was to encounter not only the suffocating manoeuvres of James’s critical essay, but to be swept aside within months by The Bostonians. The silencing of the hooded and abducted Verena Tarrant is disturbingly consonant with the silencing of Woolson—through her own suicide and through James’s destruction of their mutual correspondence.

Peter Rawlings

University of the West of England, Bristol

Rawlings2000@aol.com

“Fanny Kemble, Henry James’s Lucid Reflector”

Henry James met the well-known actress, journal writer, and poet Fanny Kemble in Rome in December 1872, a meeting that quickly led to a friendship that endured for 20 years until her death in 1893. It is well known that James's “Washington Square” was based on Kemble's account of her brother Henry Kemble's relationship with a young heiress, that the story recounted in "Georgina's Reasons" also came from Mrs. Kemble, and that "Madame de Mauves" was influenced by James' relationship with Mrs. Kemble and her daughter Sarah in Rome.  However, the significance of James' relationship with Fanny Kemble for his personal life and his work has not been fully explored.  This paper will argue that, first, Kemble represented for James the ideal observer, a living example of the fine consciousness necessary for an effective narrator. Second, she embodied a cosmopolitan perspective of American and European culture that is of such interest to James, having lived for long periods in both the United States and England. Kemble, he observed, “banished the insular from her attitude."  Third, she provided James with a sense of history that was essential for a developing novelist. Kemble gave continuity to "the far away past" and "made us touch" those notable individuals she had known—Mrs. Siddons, Sir Walter Scott, Tom Moore, Edmund Kean.  Finally, the paper will argue that these influences reveal themselves not only in the works already mentioned, but in the novels as well, particularly The American and The Ambassadors.

Dianna Vitanza

Baylor University

Dianna_Vitanza@baylor.edu

Henry James and Ellen Glasgow: A Certain Art of the Novel

Recounting a meeting with James in 1914, the American novelist Ellen Glasgow described him as a “pluperfect snob. Not an offensive snob, for he was kind and cordial and rather pathetic in a ponderous way, but the kind of innocent snob who places extravagant value on worldliness.” While this is the extent of their personal connection, both James and Glasgow share a rare trait in the publishing world. With Harcourt Brace’s 1943 publication of Ellen Glasgow’s A Certain Measure: An Interpretation of Prose Fiction, the collected prefaces from the Virginia Edition of her novels, Glasgow joined James as being one of the few novelists to have their collected prefaces published in a trade format. The critical reception of A Certain Measure indelibly connects the two authors. Howard Mumford Jones, reviewing A Certain Measure, remarks that “one has to go back to the famous prefaces by Henry James for anything of the kind possessing an equal weight and dignity.” But an analysis of the two sets of prefaces demonstrates a clear distinction between the two which illustrates both the evolution of the preface and the changing dictates of the market in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to James’s adversarial position with the reader, for instance, Glasgow positions herself with comparative humility. In this sense, she differs radically from James, who was embroiled in the commodified nature of the literary marketplace and envisioned the New York Edition as a shrine to his artistic accomplishments.

Eric Leuschner

Fort Hays State University

edleuschner@fhsu.edu