I found Henry James in my teens and kept reading him casually over the years, but I didn’t really study him until I took a grad level class at the end of my undergraduate career. It was a mistake; not that I completed the class, but that I was able to sign up for it.
As a graduate level class, this shouldn’t have been possible, but I saw that it was a Henry James seminar and I was intrigued, so much so that I registered without checking the numbers scheme attached to the title. Since the online system pushed it through, I had no idea I wasn’t meant to be there by the university’s rules. I was definitely meant to attend due to my own, or perhaps by some intervention by James himself from the other side.
I had one semester to go to finish my bachelor’s degree, and my son was almost six months old. James was perfect for sleepless nights and stressful thoughts, such as, what the hell am I going to do with an English degree? Food stamps don’t cover everything, I reminded myself, although they were a big help.
These were the days of paper stamps in booklets, which I picked up after standing in line for hours downtown at Job and Family Services. Babies cried, women cried, everyone cried. I read James to my son as he glared at me, finally joining the racket as he grew weary of James’ infamously long sentences.
Eventually someone someone in The University of Akron’s cogs discovered that I was getting graduate credit (not my aim) and I didn’t have my BA yet. I had to go into some administrator’s office, baby in my lap, and explain how I ended up in the class. He frowned when I said I just wanted to study James, as if I said something unbelievable. No, impossible. I had the same amount of work in that class as the graduate students, and finished with a B grade and the last three of a handful of undergraduate credits I needed for my oh so marketable degree.
It would be years before I was able to formally study him again, but I took my time traveling through his work until then, from Daisy Miller to The Awkward Age, Washington Square to The Golden Bowl, as well as the short stories and travel writings. I mourned Daisy’s innocence, and kicked myself for not seeing what was coming in The Ambassadors. I wondered, with my own single parent financial difficulties, if Catherine Sloper hadn’t shot herself in the foot by refusing to make an easily breakable promise to her father, and how Maggie Verver, now an Italian princess, managed not to strangle her husband and friend after discovering their infidelity.
A master’s degree in English that did not focus on James followed (long story involving a difficult marriage and another child, a daughter who became my enthusiastic research assistant during her kindergarten year), along with a practical graduate degree in library science. And then, finally -
When I began my PhD studies, I could only take classes one night a week, as I was working full-time. I stumbled on a course in book history, of the textual bibliographic sort, and leapt at the opportunity to present on Michael Anesko’s Friction With the Market. The professor would, in three more years, become my dissertation director, and in April 2008 I discovered what I would actually write about.
Finding something fresh about Henry James, so studied since the 1920s, wasn’t easy. My director, Robert, shook his head at the few suggestions I had, which were half hearted at best. He had always been very direct and clear with his corrections on my work and even joked about it; we had the kind of working relationship where I appreciated Robert’s honesty. I preferred it to someone who would tiptoe around me and waste our time.
In April 2008, I read Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation and emailed Robert, asking if maybe James’ agent, James Brand Pinker, who made regular appearances in my general James research, might be a good start.
His response was enthusiastic, and if I remember correctly, many yeses were that email, along with agreement that Pinker was at the hub of Edwardian literature and needed attention. After four long years of reading, note-taking, writing, rewriting, more rewriting, and a general lack of sleep because of my job and general life as a single parent with two children, I was done. My defense was an opportunity not only to present my work, but also to validate James’ relevance to us. To modern times, to our world.
Since then, my dissertation has appeared in bits and pieces in various areas, and while I do not work in academia and my job has nothing to do with Henry James, I would love to continue interacting with others with a Jamesian turn.
Maybe you saw what I did there, which I promise was unintentional. If you did, perhaps we are already friends.
Thank you for reading.
Henry James Sr. & his boy, Henry James Jr., 1854
A middle aged author declining in popularity. An up and coming literary agent with an eye for genius. A partnership that would forge a prodigious legacy in American literature. Read An Eye for Genius today.
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