Middle-Aged Women in Literature

Abstract

Henry James was nearly 50 when he wrote those words in his notebook; 10 years later he would begin The Ambassadors, the first of his last three great novels. Its hero is a man of 55, a man who has failed to live his life until now—even, perhaps, to recognize that he has not lived it. Henry James and his generation of American men provide all of us with a model for late achievement. Two friends from his youth, Henry Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes, were, like James, to flower late: Adams did not write Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres until he was 65 and his Education of Henry Adams until he was almost 70. Holmes reached his full powers when he was appointed to the Supreme Court at 61 (Matthiessen, 1944, p. 30). Henry’s brother, William James, whose youth was a long exercise in indecision, did not produce his first book, the important Principles of Psychology, until he was 47.

The upshot of all such reflections is that I have only to let myself go So I have said to myself all my life—so I said to myself in the far-off days of my fermenting and passionate youth. Yet I have never fully done it. The sense of it—of the need of it—rolls over me at times with commanding force: it seems the formula of my salvation, of what remains to me of a future. I am in full possession of accumulated resources—I have only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more—to do much more—than I have done. The way to do it—to affirm one’s self sur la fin—is to strike as many notes, deep, full and rapid, as one can. All life is—at my age, with all one’s artistic soul the record of it—in one’s pocket, as it were. Go on, my boy, and strike hard; have a rich and long St. Martin’s summer. Try everything, do everything, render everything—be an artist, be distinguished, to the last. (James, 1947, p. 106)