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Biography: general, Biography: literary, Prose: non-fiction
Told through the lense of Henry James's relationship with two women who particularly shaped his writing, HENRY JAMES is a unforgettable read by one of our best-loved biographers.
In 1894 Henry James tried to drown a boatload of dresses belonging to the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in the Venetian lagoon. She had fallen to her death from her Venice window three months before. James's elusive friendship with Fenimore echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who had died twenty years earlier at the age of twenty-four. From their graves they haunted his imagination, Minny inspiring the heroines of A PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, while Fenimore was resurrected in his stories and in his very vision of a writer's life.
Seeking out the hidden stories of the two women, Lyndall Gordon creates a new form of biography in which outward events are peeled back to glimpse unseen collaborators: women vital to the Master's art, who were kept under wraps.
Praise for Henry James: His Women and His Art
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A rich book in which it is a pleasure to become absorbed - Independent on Sunday - Claire Tomalin
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Wonderfully full-blooded . . . A brilliant idea . . . superbly enjoyable material, much of it unfamiliar, all of it stimulating - Guardian - Philip Horne
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Compelling . . . not an addition to the pile of "chronicle" biographies of Henry James . . . [The opening] is unforgettable, like a scene from a film . . . [This book] combines scholarly rigour with a nice line in nineteenth-century gothic - Daily Telegraph - Victoria Glendinning
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Gordon's approach to biography is imaginative and risky . . . The result is a magnificent, important book, which points the way forward for the whole biographical genre - Literary Review - Kathryn Hughes
Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973.
She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women's Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot's poetry for her. She has written the 'Life' for the Eliot website: tseliot.com.
Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford.
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