Abstract
Early in James’s first novel Watch and Ward the protagonist Roger Lawrence falls asleep while his young ward Nora, whom he is educating to become his wife, reads to him from The Heir of Redclyffe. When he awakens, he excuses himself by declaring: ‘all novels seem to me stupid. They are nothing to what I can fancy: I have in my heart a prettier romance than any of them.’ When Nora begs to hear it, he replies, ‘My denouement is not yet written … Wait till the story is finished; then you shall hear the whole’.1
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Notes
Henry James, Watch and Ward (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960) p. 70. Henceforth abbreviated in text as WW.
James, The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction ed. with an Introduction by Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956) p. 39. Henceforth FN.
James, Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914) p. 300. Henceforth NN.
James, The Theory of Fiction ed. James E. Miller, Jr., (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) p. 137. Henceforth Theory.
James, Partial Portraits with an Introduction by Leon Edel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970) pp. 254, 258. Henceforth PP.
James, The Art of the Novel with an Introduction by Richard P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934) p. 256. Henceforth AN.
Philip Sicker, Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James (Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 19.
James, Washington Square (New York: Harper, 1901) p. 260.
James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: The Modern Library, 1946) Book 2, p. 7. Henceforth references in textual parentheses.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: The Modern Library, 1943) p. 389. Sicker, op. cit., pp. 140–4, compares James’s and Lawrence’s treatment of love.
Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) pp. 108–12.
Joseph A. Boone, ‘Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James’s The Golden Bowl’, PMLA (May 1968) pp. 374–88, offers a fine analysis of the way both Maggie and Charlotte are trapped by the conventions of the Victorian marriage. The analysis applies to most of James’s women.
James, The Bostonians (New York: Dial Press, 1945) pp. 343, 345. Henceforth references in textual parentheses.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men; Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981) pp. 167–77.
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1957) pp. 113–4.
Daniel R. Schwarz, The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986) p. 25.
John Auchard, Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986) pp. 85, 89.
Gary H. Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975) p. 47. The effects of voids and silences are also discussed by
J. A. Ward, The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James’s Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 172 ff., and by Nicola Bradbury in her deconstructive reading, “’Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”: The Celebration of Absence in The Wings of the Dove,’ in Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian F. A. Bell (London: Vision Press, 1984) pp. 82–97.
Ruth Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (University of Chicago Press, 1976) p. 56.
Daniel Schneider, The Crystal Cage: Adventures of the Imagination in the Fiction of Henry James (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978) p. 63.
Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1963) pp. 93–4.
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© 1990 Ann Massa
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Nettels, E. (1990). Varieties of Love: Henry James’s Treatment of the ‘Great Relation’. In: Massa, A. (eds) American Declarations of Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20435-9_5
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