UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Life of Henry James, Sr.

Alfred Habegger

An absorbing biography of the passionate, contradictory father of William, Henry, and Alice James

"An improbably delightful biography of the father of William and Henry and Alice James; it is composed with a wry detachment that is perhaps the biographer's only means of protecting himself from the shade of his subject, who would retort from the grave if he could."

New Yorker

"The Father is as much a study of nineteenth-century religious aspirations as the life of an eccentric and interesting man. And of course its title tells what else it is: a close examination of the background of two extraordinary sons. As well as throwing a flood of light on their development, it is a rare case study of something we ought to know more about: how families work. . . . Habegger always balances judgment with sympathy, as well as scholarliness with intuition; all in all, not just an addition to Jamesiana here, but an immensely searching study."

New York Review of Books

"A welcome combination of candor and painstaking research. . . . Most biographers have given us Henry James, Sr., at home, at the head of his brilliant family. Habegger gives us a different sense of the man in the broader intellectual and cultural context of his age. . . . We are in Habegger's debt not only for filling in our knowledge of James and his age, but also, perhaps, for quietly and forcefully reminding us once more of what a long foreground some of our current social dilemmas—concerning education and intellectual freedom, sexuality and the family—have had."

Washington Post

"Habegger counters the popular view—a view, moreover, that the James family perpetuated—that Henry James, Sr., was a 'benignant' man who devoted himself to the good of his children, preached tolerance, and practiced self-effacement. Instead, he shows us a man who developed a convoluted personal philosophy to account for his own feelings of pain and guilt, his conviction of his essential sinfulness and capacity for evil, and his fragile sense of self. He was egotistical, intolerant, hot-tempered, but never less than earnest and brutally honest in his quest for truth and enlightenment. 'Henry James was wonderful, but he was hard to bear,' one critic noted in a burst of generosity. Readers of this fine biography will likely agree."

American Scholar

Alfred Habegger, formerly a professor of English at the University of Kansas, is an independent scholar living in Oregon. His biography of Emily Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, was published in October 2001 by Random House.

Biography / Literary Studies
600 pp., 32 illus.
$27.95t paper, ISBN 1-55849-331-X
October 2001

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