262 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900brothers – coddled and, arguably, stifled her. She had several breakdowns during
her relatively short life; and her daily journal, which she seems to have intended for
publication, only appeared in 1964 as The Diary of Alice James.
After being educated by private tutors until the age of 12, Henry James went to
schools in Europe and the United States. Entering Harvard Law School in 1862, he
withdrew after a year. Then, with the encouragement of Howells and Charles Eliot
Norton (1827–1908), a Harvard professor and translator of Dante, he began to
concentrate on writing. Reviews and essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the
North American Review. In 1869 he returned to Europe, his first visit as an adult, first
to England and then to Italy, which made a deep impression on him. It was while he
was in Europe that his beloved cousin Mary Temple died. How exactly this affected
his later fiction is open to debate, although the situation of an attractive, lively but
doomed or even fatally sick young girl certainly recurs in such novels as The Portrait
of a Lady and The Wings of a Dove (1902) and in the novella Daisy Miller (1878). In
any event, James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, appeared serially in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1871 (and in volume form in 1878). This was followed by his first collec-
tion, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875) and Transatlantic Sketches (1875),
and his first novels of real consequence, Roderick Hudson (1876), The American
(1877), and The Europeans (1878). The story “A Passionate Pilgrim” deals with the
reactions of an eager American “pilgrim” when confronted with the fascinations of
the complex European world of art and affairs. And James himself during this period
was something of a pilgrim in Europe, which he came to regard as his spiritual
fatherland, moving there permanently in 1875. During a year in Paris, he associated
with such masters of the art of fiction as Flaubert and Turgenev, who encouraged his
interest in what Flaubert called “le mot juste”: the right word, the careful planning
of the language and structure of the novel so as to make it an accurate register of
reality. After 1876, however, he made his home mainly in London, although he
maintained an American home in Massachusetts and, much later, moved to the
small town of Rye in Sussex.
James was developing his ideas about his craft, and expressing them in, for
instance, his well-known essay on “The Art of Fiction” (1884). He was also exploring
what were to be the dominant themes of this, the first stage of his career as a novelist,
which lasted from roughly 1870 until 1890. There is James’s interest in the mired
complexities of fate and freedom, the possibly determining influences of environ-
ment and the possible power, the capacities of the human will: “don’t talk about the
will being ‘destined,’ ” declares a character in Roderick Hudson as a contribution to
the debate, “The will is destiny itself. That’s the way to look at it.” There is his concern
for the individual consciousness and the terms it must negotiate with society, how it
maneuvers its way through moral and mental complexities. Above all, there is “the
international theme,” the series of contrasts James draws between Europe and
America. In his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879) James argued that “the good
American” of his own time would be a more complicated, “more critical person”
than the one of the time of his subject. He was thinking, among other things, of his
own difference from the author of The Scarlet Letter, which was due, he thought, notGGray_c03.indd 262ray_c 03 .indd 262 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM