Henry James

Biography

Henry James was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, New York. His father, Henry James Sr., was an Irish immigrant and intellectual who wrote on social and religious subjects, while his mother, Mary Walsh, was the daughter of a Scottish immigrant and cotton merchant in New York. James had anything but a consistent education—in his childhood and youth, James had been to ten schools before his father moved the family to Europe in 1855. In Europe, James received “an initiation into European culture” (704). Back in the United States, James spent less than a year at Harvard before being drafted into the army to fight in the civil war. However, due to health concerns, he was exempted from service. Instead of returning to Harvard, James began writing and publishing in Boston. James bounced back and forth between living in the United States and England the remainder of his life, though when he was away, he longed to be in Europe. During his life, James travelled extensively throughout Europe. Though he never married, he had close friendships with notable individuals, including George Eliot, Edith Warton, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and H. G. Wells. After suffering a stroke in December 1915, James died on February 28, 1916, at his home in England.

James wrote in several genres, including the novel, memoir, short story, literary theory, and drama. Important to his writing is his status as an expatriate and outsider, which led to a rather ambiguous writing style. Of this, he told his brother William,

“I aspire to write in such a way that it would...be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) & so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilized.” (711)

This style, along with his rise from a low-class family to a member of higher society in Europe, often figure into his stories, including “The Velvet Glove.” James, though never as popular as some other writers of his time, was an incredibly influential writer for many later writers.