Scan barcode
lnatal's review
3.0
From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Henry James was not only a great novelist - he also wrote a great deal of entertaining non-fiction, producing reviews and essays on a wide variety of subjects. To mark the centenary of his death, these five anthologies reveal James through his letters, memoirs, essays and private notebooks.
Episode 1: Europe versus America.
Was James English or American? The British tend to regard him as American, the Americans as British. Although born in America, James's wealthy, eccentric father moved the family around constantly - to France, England, Switzerland, Boston - so the young James never felt settled in America. In fact, Henry James lived more of his life in his adopted country of England than in his native America. At the end of his life, he took British nationality in 1915 as a gesture of solidarity and as a protest against American neutrality in the First World War. But in some ways he always remained an outsider, and felt an outsider in both cultures.
James' writing gives us an insight into both societies. After he'd settled in London he composed a negative catalogue about his homeland - the tone hovers somewhere between real critique and self-mockery of the Englishman's snobbery about Americans.
The anthology has been selected by Professor Philip Horne of University College London, who is founding General Editor of a major scholarly edition of James's fiction and has re-transcribed the notebooks for an authoritative new edition.
Reader: Henry Goodman
With introductions by Olivia Williams
Producer: Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071skp7
4* Daisy Miller
3* Washington Square
4* The Ambassadors
4* The Turn of the Screw
4* The Wings of the Dove
4* The Portrait of a Lady
2* The Bostonians
2* The Real Thing
4* The Aspern Papers
3* What Maisie Knew
4* A Little Tour in France
3* The Madonna of the Future
2* Lady Barbarina and Other Tales
4* The Beast in the Jungle
3* The Jolly Corner
3* The Art of Fiction
3* Roderick Hudson
3* Henry James: A Life in Letters
TR The Tragic Muse
TR The Pupil
TR The Other House
TR The Spoils of Poynton
TR The Princess Casamassima
TR Hawthorne
TR The Great Good Place
TR The Art of the Novel
TR The Middle Years
TR The Golden Bowl
TR Nona Vincent
TR Italian Hours
TR The Ivory Tower
TR Ghost Stories
TR The Outcry
TR Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
About Henry James:
3* The Real Henry James by Philip Horne
3* Henry James at Work by Theodora Bosanquet
TR Portraits from life by Ford Madox Ford
TR The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad by F.R. Leavis
TR The Realists: Eight Portraits: by C.P. Snow
TR A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women & His Art by Lyndall Gordon
Henry James was not only a great novelist - he also wrote a great deal of entertaining non-fiction, producing reviews and essays on a wide variety of subjects. To mark the centenary of his death, these five anthologies reveal James through his letters, memoirs, essays and private notebooks.
Episode 1: Europe versus America.
Was James English or American? The British tend to regard him as American, the Americans as British. Although born in America, James's wealthy, eccentric father moved the family around constantly - to France, England, Switzerland, Boston - so the young James never felt settled in America. In fact, Henry James lived more of his life in his adopted country of England than in his native America. At the end of his life, he took British nationality in 1915 as a gesture of solidarity and as a protest against American neutrality in the First World War. But in some ways he always remained an outsider, and felt an outsider in both cultures.
James' writing gives us an insight into both societies. After he'd settled in London he composed a negative catalogue about his homeland - the tone hovers somewhere between real critique and self-mockery of the Englishman's snobbery about Americans.
The anthology has been selected by Professor Philip Horne of University College London, who is founding General Editor of a major scholarly edition of James's fiction and has re-transcribed the notebooks for an authoritative new edition.
Reader: Henry Goodman
With introductions by Olivia Williams
Producer: Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071skp7
4* Daisy Miller
3* Washington Square
4* The Ambassadors
4* The Turn of the Screw
4* The Wings of the Dove
4* The Portrait of a Lady
2* The Bostonians
2* The Real Thing
4* The Aspern Papers
3* What Maisie Knew
4* A Little Tour in France
3* The Madonna of the Future
2* Lady Barbarina and Other Tales
4* The Beast in the Jungle
3* The Jolly Corner
3* The Art of Fiction
3* Roderick Hudson
3* Henry James: A Life in Letters
TR The Tragic Muse
TR The Pupil
TR The Other House
TR The Spoils of Poynton
TR The Princess Casamassima
TR Hawthorne
TR The Great Good Place
TR The Art of the Novel
TR The Middle Years
TR The Golden Bowl
TR Nona Vincent
TR Italian Hours
TR The Ivory Tower
TR Ghost Stories
TR The Outcry
TR Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
About Henry James:
3* The Real Henry James by Philip Horne
3* Henry James at Work by Theodora Bosanquet
TR Portraits from life by Ford Madox Ford
TR The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad by F.R. Leavis
TR The Realists: Eight Portraits: by C.P. Snow
TR A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women & His Art by Lyndall Gordon
More...