Book description
Her thesis is that there were two women in James's life whose influence
was so profound that they can be seen as partners, even collaborators in
his art. Their ties to him were not sexual but imaginative, and their
force was exerted posthumously: they were ghostly collaborators . . .
all Jamesians will want to read Lyndall Gordon, for the breadth of her
knowledge and sympathies, for the way she makes us think again about
Henry James, and for her finely researched and beautifully presented
pictures of the American background from which James, his cousin Minny
and his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson came' Claire Tomalin
James's friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson ended in 1894 when
he tried to drown a boatload of her dresses in the Venetian lagoon; she
had fallen to her death three months before. It was an elusive
friendship that echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who
had died twenty years earlier. From their graves, these two women
haunted his imagination and his fiction, inspiring the creation of his
heroines.
'Wonderfully full-blooded. A brilliant idea superbly enjoyable
material, much of it unfamiliar, all of it stimulating' Philip Horne, Guardian
'Imaginative and risky . . . A magnificent, important book' Kathryn
Hughes, Literary Review
Lyndall Gordon is the prizewinning biographer of people such as
Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft. Born and
raised in South Africa, Lyndall is a fellow of St Hilda's College,
Oxford.
