Henry James: His Women and His Art
Author(s): Lyndall Gordon
In 1894 Henry James tried to drown a boatload of dresses belonging to the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in the Venetian lagoon. She had fallen to her death from her Venice window three months before. James's elusive friendship with Fenimore echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who had died twenty years earlier at the age of twenty-four. From their graves they haunted his imagination, Minny inspiring the heroines of A Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, while Fenimore was resurrected in his stories and in his very vision of a writer's life. Seeking out the hidden stories of the two women, Lyndall Gordon creates a new form of biography in which outward events are peeled back to glimpse unseen collaborators: women vital to the Master's art, who were kept under wraps.
Product Information
Told through the lense of Henry James's relationship with two women who particularly shaped his writing, A Private Life of Henry James is a unforgettable read by one of our best-loved biographers.
'A rich book in which it is a pleasure to become absorbed' -- Claire Tomalin Independent on Sunday 'Wonderfully full-blooded ... A brilliant idea ... superbly enjoyable material, much of it unfamiliar, all of it stimulating' -- Philip Horne Guardian 'Compelling ... not an addition to the pile of "chronicle" biographies of Henry James ... [The opening] is unforgettable, like a scene from a film ... [This book] combines scholarly rigour with a nice line in nineteenth-century gothic' -- Victoria Glendinning Daily Telegraph 'Gordon's approach to biography is imaginative and risky ... The result is a magnificent, important book, which points the way forward for the whole biographical genre' -- Kathryn Hughes Literary Review
Lyndall Gordon is the prizewinning biographer of people such as Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft. Born and raised in South Africa, Lyndall is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.
General Fields
- :
- : Little, Brown Book Group
- : Virago Press Ltd
- : 01 September 2012
- : 198mm X 126mm
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 November 2012
- : books
Special Fields
- : Lyndall Gordon
- : Paperback
- : 1
- : 813.4
- : 544
