A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art

Sitting in a gondola in the Venice Lagoon, in a macabre gesture of mourning, Henry James attempts to drown a boatload of elegant, austere dresses; one by one, they obstinately float up to the surface. So begins Gordon's biography, which concerns the muselike influence of two women on the great American novelist. And the two women in question--James's fetching and vivacious cousin Mary Temple and the brilliant, if mercurial, novelist and story writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper--make quite compelling characters. Gordon presents a strong case for the impact of Temple and Woolson (commonly called ""Fenimore"") on James's artistic development, effectively documenting how James translated his emotionally charged relationships with the women, both doomed to untimely deaths, into his fiction. Gordon identifies aspects of Temple in such James creations as Isabel Archer and Milly Thrale, and sees the odd Florentine m nage of James and Woolson as the stuff out of which his Italian tales (such as ""The Aspern Papers"") were made. In addition to detailed and intimate individual pictures, Gordon (Charlotte Bront : A Passionate Life), in her group portrait of ""Harry, Minny and Connie,"" captures their milieu, which might be called the New England aristocracy of the last century. Her habit of trying to sound just like a late Victorian writer herself--whether by reading into her subjects' physiognomies their exact personality traits, or in phrases like ""the freedoms of Fenimore passed scrutiny in the guise of retiring gentlewoman""--can be taken too far and become distracting. In the end, though, her evocation of the period, like a good costume drama, suffuses this eccentric cast of characters with an appealing late Victorian ambience. Photos. (Apr.)