The first was his orphaned cousin Minny Temple who at 16 cut off her hair
The first was his orphaned cousin Minny Temple, who at 16 cut off her hair. “Could no one wrest the shears from her vandal hand?” asked Henry’s brother William, excited by the bared contour of Minny’s neck even as he called her “insane”. Their mother deplored an unpolished girl who defied the norm of inanimate ladyhood and laughed in an open-mouthed way, showing all her teeth. “You’ve recognised me – which is rather beautiful and rare,” Maria remarks to the Jamesian man as they stroll along the old wall of Chester with its gaps and dips. Fenimore disarmed James with self-effacement, while her fictions challenged his scorn for women writers. She soothed editors with modest letters which went out of their way to stress how inferior was the lot of a single woman who must write for a living to that of a cherished wife. It is uncertain to what extent she believed this in the loneliness she certainly endured, but her best stories question marriage and feminine dependence.
Her 14-year tie with James is filled with mystery: they had a pact to destroy their correspondence and kept their reunions secret: a shared house outside Florence in 1887, a spell in Geneva in 1888, and four days in Paris in the summer of 1893.Fenimore’s roaming life, her trophies of “Europe”, and the psychological home she offered the expatriate in James, provided a model for the independent traveller, Maria Gostrey, in The Ambassadors. James involved himself with two women who lived – precariously – on the evolutionary frontier. One was an ambitious writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper – privately, James called her “Fenimore”. Among her works are three extraordinary stories of artists which precede James’s pre-eminence in that genre.
In fact, he took from her his title for the short story “The Figure in the Carpet”, as well as the idea for “The Beast in the Jungle”, a tale in which an ageing man fails to recognise a commanding experience for which he has waited all his life. Other perceptive men have shown us women such as Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary who are victims of their passions, but James shows us unfamiliar possibilities; not women as we are, but as we might be.
The insights didn’t come just from intuition. 13 ladies clinging to Mr James.”
He was a celebrity among the titled and the fashionable, but his particular appeal for women had a more solid cause. James understood women almost better than we understand ourselves: in Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady he redefines a “lady” as a woman who can face up to an imprisoning marriage through an inward freedom to choose her path; in Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, he created a plain young woman who survives with dignity a bullying father and a captivating fortune-hunter; and in Milly Theale, he invented a woman who can transform a low plot to gain her fortune into a drama of her own which opens up a rare form of love at the end of The Wings of the Dove. ELIZABETH ROBINS, who acted in Henry James’s own adaptation of his novel The American for the stage, recalled “that Mr James was much beset by the attention of ladies”. In the aftermath of Roth’s own messy divorce from actress Claire Bloom, Communist is wise enough to eschew perfection And it is very, very good.Steven G Kellman,Atlanta Journal and Constitution.