The British Reception of Henry James's Autobiographies

IN The Ordeal of Consciousness, Dorothea Krook describes Henry James's autobiographies as of art of the maturest Jamesian vintage; as such they form an integral part of the Jamesian oeuvres.1 Published in I962, Krook's observation marks a significant shift in the critics' approach to A Small Boy and Others (I 9 I 3) and Notes of a Son and Brother (I9I4). For during the sixties, Jamesians began to direct at the autobiographies the kind and degree of critical scrutiny previously paid to the fiction alone. They began to discuss them as works of literary art possessing thematic patterns and narrative structures amenable to formal analysis. More recently they have begun to examine the role of the autobiographies in James's late artistic development. No longer are A Small Boy and Notes being treated as isolated ventures in the autobiographical mode, distinct from James's work in earlier phases of his career and valued primarily for the biographical data they provide about these phases. Now they are read as experiments in narrative art emerging from an autobiographical impulse that has its origins in James's technical innovations of the late I89os, as well as in his preoccupation with the man of imagination as an ideal subject for his fiction.2

Art · Art history · Biography · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Short Stories in Global Literature

• Henry James's Autobiography

  Meghan Marie Hammond•a/b Auto/Biography Studies•2012

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