Knowra Henry James Henry James Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-born novelist and literary critic who became a British subject. His fiction is known for psychological depth, shifting points of view, and close attention to social perception.
The Portrait of a Lady : A novel by Henry James about Isabel Archer, an American woman confronting the consequences of her independence and marriage. Its heroine’s choices make the conflict between freedom and social constraint central.
Point of view (literature) : The position and perspective from which a literary work presents events and information. James often restricts knowledge to a character’s perceptions, shaping what a story can reveal.
Albany, New York : A city in New York State where Henry James was born in 1843. His American birth preceded a life spent increasingly in Europe.
Edith Wharton : An American novelist and short-story writer whose fiction examined social class and manners. Wharton admired James, corresponded with him, and continued his scrutiny of social constraint.
The Art of the Novel : A collection of Henry James’s prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction. The prefaces set out James’s ideas about form, point of view, and the novelist’s craft.
The Turn of the Screw : A novella by Henry James in which a governess reports seeing ghosts while caring for two children. Its uncertain account makes the reader question whether the haunting is supernatural or psychological.
Free indirect discourse : A narrative style that blends third-person narration with the idiom and perceptions of a character. It lets James move between narrator and character without quotation marks or explicit thought tags.
Henry James Sr. : An American theologian and writer, and the father of Henry and William James. His family’s intellectual culture shaped Henry James’s early education and ambitions.
Robert Louis Stevenson : A Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist whose works include Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Their disagreement over fiction’s purpose exposed contrasting ideas about realism and romance.
Modernism : A broad movement in the arts that challenged inherited forms and conventions, especially in the early twentieth century. James’s late fiction anticipated modernist interest in fractured perspective and subjective experience.
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