Henry James, Collected Stories, Everyman’s Library no. 244, Alfred Knopf 1999, hb, 1089 pp.

In September I posted on the final few short stories by the American (later naturalised British) master, Henry James, in vol. 1 of the Everyman ‘Collected’ edition (link HERE). Now for the first six stories in vol. 2.

They were first published in periodicals between 1892 and 1894, when James was in his late 40s – early 50s. Not exactly ‘late’ period James, then, but headed that way. In other words, the prose style was becoming more ‘difficult’, complicated syntactically, and the themes were developing – as we shall see. Here are stories that have supernatural elements, even ghosts, but a recurring theme is that of the role, status or dynamics of the artist’s life and character, and relations to their work and audience.

‘The Private Life’ is set in an Alpine hotel where fashionable socialite Lord Mellifont is discovered to have no ‘private’ life. When alone he disappears. Another character, a writer, is kind of the reverse, and is found to have a sort of doppelganger. A very strange story.

‘The Real Thing’ is one I’ve read a couple of times in the past, and is one of James’s most interesting. An upper-class married couple persuades an artist to employ them as models for his paintings, but they’re so stiffly incapable of resembling anyone other than themselves that they are useless. His unsophisticated working-class models, otoh, are brilliant at embodying ‘the represented subject over the real one’. Artifact, that is, is aesthetically more satisfying than the ‘real thing’.

‘Owen Wingrave’ is the ghost story. A young man disappoints his family, with its military history, by refusing to join the armed forces, despite having been trained up for it. The suspicions that some harbour that he’s a coward are confounded in dramatic ways.

‘The Middle Years’ is a dense, slowly unfolding story. A novelist is convalescing at the English seaside. A young doctor who becomes his disciple attends to him when he falls gravely ill again, neglecting the wealthy patroness who was poised to make him her heir. He has to choose between his loyalty to the art of his patient and the prospects of a fortune.

‘The Death of the Lion’ is yet another spin on the ‘great artist with a flawed character’ theme. Written in HJ’s developing ‘difficult’ style, this story took some effort to get into, but was worth the effort, as it turned into a witty critique of the crass behaviour of the upper classes in country houses. There’s this about a dreadful princess: ‘She had been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything, and the echoes of her education respond awfully to the rash footfall – I mean the casual remark – in the cold Valhalla of her memory.’ Yes, I had to read that several times for its delightfully acrid force to sink in.

‘The Coxon Fund’ is another story with a literary background, and another writer with a flawed character and dubious authenticity as an artist. The author in question sponges shamelessly off wealthy admirers, and neglects his family. There’s a plot involving the choice a woman must make about securing her own future or that of the drunken author. An odd story, one I found rather confusing. Moral questions are raised, but the narrative heads off in unexpected directions.

So that’s my last word on Henry James for this year. I’m sure I’ll return to the remaining stories – there are many of them – in 2026.

Next time a complete contrast: Jane Austen.