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Henry James at Work
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ALSO BY LYALL H. POWERS
Henry James: An Introduction and Interpretation
Henry James and the Naturalist Movement
Ed. Henry James's Major Novels: Essays in Criticism
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha Comedy
rif
Ed. (with Leon Edel) The Complete Notebooks Henry James
Ed. Leon Edel and Literary Art
Ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton, Letters 1900-1915
rif
The Portrait a Lady: Maiden, Woman, and Heroine
rif
Alien Heart: The Life and Work Margaret Laurence
..
Henry James at Work
by Theodora Bosanquet
WITH EXCERPTS FROM HER, DIARY AND AN
ACCOUNT OF HER PROFESSIONAL CAREER
EDITED WITH NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS BY
Lyall H. Powers
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2006 by Lyall H. Powers
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
@ Printed on acid-free paper
2009 2008 2007 2006 4
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record Jar this book is available Jrom the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bosanquet, Theodora.
Henry James at work / by Theodora Bosanquet ; with excerpts from
her diary and an account of her professional career; edited with
notes and introductions by Lyall H. Powers.
p. em.
ISBN-Il: 978-0-472-11571-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-Io: 0-4]2-11571-, (cloth: alk. paper)
I. James, Henry, 1843-1916. I. Powers, Lyall H. II. Title.
PS2 I 23 .B6 2006
8Ij'·4--dc22
[BI 2006020164
ISBN13 978-0-472-11571-6 (cloth)
ISBN13 978-0-472-02586-2 (electronic)
For Loretta
AND IN HOMAGE TO LEON EDEL
(19°7-1997)
Priface
Theodora Bosanquet is hardly a household name familiar to most edu
cated readers. For that matter, Henry James is now scarcely less unfa
miliar; and the book she wrote about him, Henry James at Work, is rec
ognized only by the learned few. But who among them has actually
read it? Henry James (1843-1916) is, of course, arguably the most
accomplished author to be produced in the United States of America,
a novelist and short story writer, theoretic and practical critic, drama
tist and travel writer. Henry James at Work is a slim volume published
by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press, London, in
1924. The author was a youthful woman of forty-four and, in spite of
her rather arresting name, of solid English background-
whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air-
and properly educated in good English schools. She spent the last eight
years of Henry James's life (called "the Major Phase" by old Jamesians)
as his amanuensis, chiefly at Lamb House, down in Rye (East) Sussex,
near the Channel Coast, and finally at 2 I Carlyle Mansions on the
north bank of the Thames in London.
James's need of secretarial assistance arose, early in 1897, with the
onset of "writer's cramp"-now called "carpal tunnel syndrome." He
first employed a particularly dour Scot named Macalpine to take his
dictation in shorthand and then provide a typed copy; but, finding him
too expensive and singularly unresponsive to the material being dic
tated, James decided he wouldn't do. James was then composing "The
Turn of the Screw," in which his technique was intended to make his
readers "think the evil for themselves" (and there was an abundance of
Fiii / PREFACF
opportunity for that); Macalpine evidently thought nothing at all. He
was replaced at the turn of the century. Mary Weld from the Secre
tarial Bureau of Miss Mary Petherbridge, in London, moved into the
vacancy and served until August 1904, when James left for the United
States. W dd married soon after. James tried others, but none really
satisfied until the advent of Theodora Bosanquet.
The need was urgent: James had embarked on the exhausting proj
ect of reviewing and revising his prose works-novels and stories~
for a "definitive edition" to be published by Scribner's in hventy-three
volumes (December 1907-July 1909, it grew to twenty-four), in evi
dent emulation of Balzac's tvventv-three-volume Comedie humaine. Into
/
that demanding chore Miss Bosanquet was immediately launched--
and gratefully. The experience would urge and foster her own nascent
literary career. She soon began contributing items to the Saturday
Westminster Gazette, coauthored a novel published before James's death
(February I 9 16 ), and would complete, a few months later, the first of
three major essays on Henry James, her "own great Man.'" A year
later she completed the second, and at the end of 1920, the third.
These formed the basis for her memoir HenryJames at Work.
The little book emphasized the "spiritual" quality of James as an
author, his indebtedness to an inspirational force very like the poet's
muse; James called it "my good angel"-mon bon anae, usually short
ened to the familiar "mon bon." Bosanquet makes a strong case in
favor of the author's revised versions of his fictions as superior to the
originals. She recognizes clearly the "difficulty" of James's late style-
and sometimes vigorously castigates it (in the privacy of her personal
diary)~but defends it intelligently in Henry James at Work. The argu
ment she persuasively presents is that the revisions regularly result in
a more lifelike depiction of characters, settings, and actions, and
therefore a more significant, more meaningful realism. With that, the
,. Sec Diary A, entry for J 2 December J 907.
130sanquet kept a single diary during her years with James and after. I have, how
eyer, arranged entries quoted according to topics into three groups here and called
them Diary A- on Bosanquet's professional relationship with James and his family
and a few fricmh; Diary 13 --on her literary taste and affiliations; and Diary C --on
her interest in psychic phenomena. The entries in each grouping are giYl'n in chrono
logical order. I make a few references to entries not reproduced here, The diary
manuscript is in the Houghton Library' of Han'ard UniYersity,
Priface / ix
revised version sharpens the important distinction between telling and
showing, presentation and representation: lifelikeness depends on the
quality of self-containment in fiction that is able to stand on its own,
apparently free of the author's controlling hand. James's art
(Theodora insists) enabled him to exhibit life dramatically and so to
transmit the convincing look oflife-"the look that conveys its mean
ing." A convincing and original critical perception. It is perhaps the
originality of Theodora Bosanquet's acute critical observations that
will most urgently grasp readers of Henry James at Work.
