Henry James

In 1894 Henry James tried to drown a boatload of dresses belonging to the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in the Venetian lagoon. She had fallen to her death from her Venice window three months before. James's elusive friendship with Fenimore echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who had died twenty years earlier at the age of twenty-four. From their graves they haunted his imagination, Minny inspiring the heroines of A PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, while Fenimore was resurrected in his stories and in his very vision of a writer's life.

Seeking out the hidden stories of the two women, Lyndall Gordon creates a new form of biography in which outward events are peeled back to glimpse unseen collaborators: women vital to the Master's art, who were kept under wraps.

“'Wonderfully full-blooded . . . A brilliant idea . . . superbly enjoyable material, much of it unfamiliar, all of it stimulating'”

A rich book in which it is a pleasure to become absorbed - Independent on Sunday - Claire Tomalin

Wonderfully full-blooded . . . A brilliant idea . . . superbly enjoyable material, much of it unfamiliar, all of it stimulating - Guardian - Philip Horne

Compelling . . . not an addition to the pile of "chronicle" biographies of Henry James . . . [The opening] is unforgettable, like a scene from a film . . . [This book] combines scholarly rigour with a nice line in nineteenth-century gothic - Daily Telegraph - Victoria Glendinning

Gordon's approach to biography is imaginative and risky . . . The result is a magnificent, important book, which points the way forward for the whole biographical genre - Literary Review - Kathryn Hughes

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.

'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 unfamiliar, all of it stimulating' Philip Horne, Guardian 'Imaginative and risky . . . A magnificent, important book' Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review

In 1894 Henry James tried to drown a boatload of dresses belonging to the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in the Venetian lagoon. She had fallen to her death from her Venice window three months before. James's elusive friendship with Fenimore echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who had died twenty years earlier at the age of twenty-four. From their graves they haunted his imagination, Minny inspiring the heroines of A PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, while Fenimore was resurrected in his stories and in his very vision of a writer's life.Seeking out the hidden stories of the two women, Lyndall Gordon creates a new form of biography in which outward events are peeled back to glimpse unseen collaborators: women vital to the Master's art, who were kept under wraps.

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