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A biography of the passionate, contradictory father of William,
Henry and Alice James. The author counters the popular view - a
view that the James family perpetuated - that Henry James Sr was a
""benignant"" man who devoted himself to the good of his children,
preached tolerance, and practised self-effacement. Instead, he
shows us a man who developed a convoluted personal philosophy to
account for his own feelings of pain and guilt, his conviction of
his essential sinfulness and capacity for evil, and his fragile
sense of self. The work sets Henry James Sr in the broader
intellectual and cultural context of his age. As well as throwing
light on the development of James's two sons, it is also a study of
how families work.
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson’s growth–a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production.
Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new material from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson’s own letters. Habegger discovers the best available answers to the pressing questions about the poet: Was she lesbian? Who was the person she evidently loved? Why did she refuse to publish and why was this refusal so integral an aspect of her work? Habegger also illuminates many of the essential connection sin Dickinson’s story: between the decay of doctrinal Protestantism and the emergence of her riddling lyric vision; between her father’s political isolation after the Whig Party’s collapse and her private poetic vocation; between her frustrated quest for human intimacy and the tuning of her uniquely seductive voice.
The definitive treatment of Dickinson’s life and times, and of her poetic development, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books shows how she could be both a woman of her era and a timeless creator. Although many aspects of her life and work will always elude scrutiny, her living, changing profile at least comes into focus in this meticulous and magisterial biography.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Complete Letters of Henry James fills a crucial gap in modern
literary studies by presenting in a scholarly edition the complete
letters of one of the great novelists and letter writers of the
English language. Comprising more than ten thousand letters
reflecting on a remarkably wide range of topics—from James’s
own life and literary projects to broader questions on art,
literature, and criticism—this edition is an indispensable
resource for students of James and of American and English
literature, culture, and criticism. It will also be essential for
research libraries throughout North America and Europe and for
scholars who specialize in James, the European novel, and modern
literature. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias have conceived
this edition according to the exacting standards of the Committee
on Scholarly Editions. The first in the series, this two-volume
work includes the letters from 1854 to 1869 in volume one and the
letters from 1869 to 1872 in volume two.
A brave British widow goes to Siam and-by dint of her principled
and indomitable character-inspires that despotic nation to abolish
slavery and absolute rule: this appealing legend first took shape
after the Civil War when Anna Leonowens came to America from
Bangkok and succeeded in becoming a celebrity author and lecturer.
Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story
would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret
Landon's best-selling book Anna and the King of Siam and Rodgers
and Hammerstein's musical The King and I. But who was Leonowens and
why did her story take hold? Although it has been known for some
time that she was of Anglo-Indian parentage and that her tales
about the Siamese court are unreliable, not until now, with the
publication of Masked, has there been a deeply researched account
of her extraordinary life. Alfred Habegger, an award-winning
biographer, draws on the archives of five continents and recent
Thai-language scholarship to disclose the complex person behind the
mask and the troubling facts behind the myth. He also ponders the
curious fit between Leonowens's compelling fabrications and the New
World's innocent dreams-in particular the dream that democracy can
be spread through quick and easy interventions. Exploring the full
historic complexity of what it once meant to pass as white, Masked
pays close attention to Leonowens's midlevel origins in British
India, her education at a Bombay charity school for Eurasian
children, her material and social milieu in Australia and
Singapore, the stresses she endured in Bangkok as a working widow,
the latent melancholy that often afflicted her, the problematic
aspects of her self-invention, and the welcome she found in
America, where a circle of elite New England abolitionists who knew
nothing about Southeast Asia gave her their uncritical support. Her
embellished story would again capture America's imagination as
World War II ended and a newly interventionist United States looked
toward Asia.
This is a historical critique of Henry James in relation to
nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. Habegger has
brought to light extensive new documentation on James's tangled
connections with what was thought and written about women in his
time. The emphasis is equally on his life and on his fictions. This
is the first book to investigate his father's bizarre lifelong
struggle with free love and feminism, a struggle that played a
major role in shaping James. The book also shows how seriously he
distorted the truth about the cousin, Minnie Temple, whose
self-assertive image inspired him; and how indebted he was to
certain American women writers whom he attacked in reviews but
whose plots and heroines he appropriated in his own fiction.
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