Was henry james gay

Accordingly he quickly passes on to other memories.

Henry James rsquo s

Henry James, age 11, with his father, Henry James Sr. – daguerreotype by Mathew Brady James was born at 21 Washington Place (facing Washington Square) in New York City on 15 April His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr. His father was intelligent and steadfastly congenial.

The surviving letters span 20 years. I quote and cite letters that you say I omit. You rejected his own statements of fact and intention, and relied instead on Freud, your higher authority. Even James, for all his fondness for florid language, would not describe receiving a letter of acceptance from the North American Review it was not even his first published work and a call from E.

James’ sexual orientation is necessarily portrayed, and I take it for granted–as most scholars do now–that he was a closeted gay man. You dwell on a single sexual encounter that takes no more than a page in my book and is not referred to again.

He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent means from his father, William James. My book summarizes a great deal of work done by others, as well as my own research—a point you neglect to mention. Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism.

I point out numerous errors and outright inventions in your work, mistakes you give a fair sample of in your S LATE story. Your own much-praised biography was a product of its time. And so on. Already a member? Slate homepage. What I do say in my book, and give considerably more prominence—and what you fail to mention—is that your own biography of James is no longer useful.

You want there to be only one memory—of literary events—but this reading does not seem possible.

The Passion of Henry

The inner life of Henry James (–) is as difficult to penetrate as the secret history of the characters in his convoluted novels. To be certain about his homosexuality is to be certain about the existence of the ghost Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw.

The point of all this seems to be for you to deny that James, although his principal affections were for men, ever had sexual contact with a man. The full truth probably matches the admission of the narrator of The Sacred Fount: "It would have been almost as embarrassing to.

If you value our work, please disable your ad blocker. Whatever your reasons, you have allowed yourself to be provoked into saying outrageous things, and I have no choice but to answer plainly. Copy Link Share Share Comment. This is your obsession, not mine.

Sign in here. You omit the more bizarre and self-discrediting portions of the announcement. You do yourself no credit by these exaggerated denunciations, and you make it difficult for me to respond with the respect that would otherwise be due your age and position.

It would be more graceful for you to let a younger generation explore the data and form our own conclusions. So confident were you of your theory and your exclusive access to the James papers that you made it almost a point of principle to write without checking your sources, and you gave few citations.

In your story you hint that James was impotent, and you quote a bizarre, homophobic pronouncement by a doctor who examined James once when he was ill and away from home, then announced to a breathless world that the famous novelist was badly hung.

If you want to block ads but still support Slate, consider subscribing. Contrary to what you say, there was not just one incident but a lifelong friendship between James and Paul Zhukovsky.