Henry James's Feminist Afterlives

This book explores Henry Jamess negotiations with nineteenth-century ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and literary style through the responses of three women who have never before been substantively examined in light of their relationships to his work. Writing in different times and places, Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, and Marguerite Duras nevertheless share complex navigations of womanhood and authorship, as well as a history of feminist scholarly responses to their work. Kathryn Wichelns draws upon James correspondence with Fields, as well as Dickinsons and Durass revisions of his fiction, to offer a new understanding of gender-transgressive elements of his project. By contextualizing his writing within a diverse set of feminist perspectives, each grounded in a specific time and place, as well as nineteenth-century views of queer male sexuality, Wichelns demonstrates the centrality of Henry Jamess ambivalent identifications with women tohis work.