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lnatal's review
3.0
From BBC Radio 4 Extra: 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.
Episode 2: Dining Out in English Society
Entertaining glimpses of English society through the sharp eyes of an American observer. James was an inveterate diner-out, and once managed 107 dinners in a season. He left sharp observations of the people he met at dinner, including the great writers of the day:
Episode 3: Modern Women
Henry James was a lifelong bachelor, but many of his closest friendships were with women. And his novels are known for his sensitive and sympathetic treatment of women's experience - very often as his central characters.
Episode 4: Encounters with Famous People
Henry James ended his career in London in the early twentieth century as a figure of great dignity, known to his admirers as 'the Master'. But as a shy child, and a bashful young man, early in his career he had met some of the literary giants of the Victorian age. James's father Henry James Senior was a well-known and well-connected intellectual figure - though very eccentric - so all sorts of eminent people passed through the house. Towards the end of his life, James still remembers being overwhelmed by embarrassment and self-consciousness during an encounter with the most famous novelist of the day - the author of Vanity Fair.
Episode 5: Childhood and Family
It may seem paradoxical to end a series on Henry James by going back to his childhood - but that's what James himself did in old age. As he approached 70, James began to look back over his life and career - by then he was the only one of five siblings to survive - and found that his early memories and associations multiplied with an almost uncontrollable vividness.
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
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.
Episode 2: Dining Out in English Society
Entertaining glimpses of English society through the sharp eyes of an American observer. James was an inveterate diner-out, and once managed 107 dinners in a season. He left sharp observations of the people he met at dinner, including the great writers of the day:
Episode 3: Modern Women
Henry James was a lifelong bachelor, but many of his closest friendships were with women. And his novels are known for his sensitive and sympathetic treatment of women's experience - very often as his central characters.
Episode 4: Encounters with Famous People
Henry James ended his career in London in the early twentieth century as a figure of great dignity, known to his admirers as 'the Master'. But as a shy child, and a bashful young man, early in his career he had met some of the literary giants of the Victorian age. James's father Henry James Senior was a well-known and well-connected intellectual figure - though very eccentric - so all sorts of eminent people passed through the house. Towards the end of his life, James still remembers being overwhelmed by embarrassment and self-consciousness during an encounter with the most famous novelist of the day - the author of Vanity Fair.
Episode 5: Childhood and Family
It may seem paradoxical to end a series on Henry James by going back to his childhood - but that's what James himself did in old age. As he approached 70, James began to look back over his life and career - by then he was the only one of five siblings to survive - and found that his early memories and associations multiplied with an almost uncontrollable vividness.
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
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