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"Henry James is one of the greatest and most influential novelists in the English language, and certainly the preeminent American novelist. But this is only the second biography of James ever to be written and the first to be conceived in the light of late-twentieth-century attitudes about feminism and homosexuality. With understanding and sensitivity, this biography creates a richly woven synthesis of the complexities of James's life and world - the eccentric, troubled family into which he was born, his struggle to define himself as an artist and as an American, his decision to live as an expatriate in Europe, the American and European social life in which he participated, his complex sensibility in relation to men, and his fascination with the problems and positions of women in late-Victorian society. Unlike any previous analysis of James, it presents the man as much in the light of the political and economic forces that shaped his life as in the aesthetic." "James was an acute observer of personal relationships, and his life was rich in friendships with the literary and artistic great of the Victorian and the early modern world, from Browning, Tennyson, Turgenev, Flaubert, Stevenson, and Burne-Jones to Sargent, Wilde, Shaw, Kipling, Howells, Wells, Conrad, Crane, Ford Madox Ford, and Edith Wharton. Essentially a private, even secretive man, whose favorite disguises promoted enabling self-deceptions, James lived most fully in his mind, his imagination, and his art, and expressed himself best in his letters and in his fiction. His own correspondence, as well as family letters, both published and unpublished, are at the heart of this biography's vivid portrait of a great artist whose elusiveness as a man is part of his strategy as a writer. As James himself advocated and would have wanted, this is an artful dramatic biography, placing the chronological narrative of James's life in the historical context of his times."--BOOK JACKET.
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