Alfred Habegger The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 578 pages, $30
reviewed by James W. Tuttleton
Henry James, Sr. (1811–1882), is nowadays principally remembered for having sired two—or perhaps three—literary geniuses: William James, the psychologist and philosopher; Henry James, Jr., the novelist (who, after the family custom, will hereafter be called Harry); and, arguably, Alice, the remarkable daughter whose mental illness and lifelong invalidism—recounted in a compelling, posthumously published diary—are sometimes wildly attributed to “the Victorian patriarchical oppression of women.” Each of these children has been the subject of his own biography; and, indeed, the story of the two other sons of Henry (the non-geniuses Bob and Wilkie James) has also been told in Jane Maher’s Biography of Broken Fortunes. But for Miss Maher the father, Henry Sr., does not count: she subtitles her book Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James. We have even had a number of group lives, like C. Hartley Grattan’s The Three Jameses (Henry Sr., William, and Harry), F. O. Matthiessen’s The James Family, Katherine Weissbourd’s Growing Up in the James Family, and R. W. B. Lewis’s The Jameses: A Family Narrative.
But, since it has been sixty years since Austin Warren’s The Elder Henry James and much new information about the Jameses has emerged, Alfred Habegger’s new biography, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr., is timely indeed. Mr. Habegger brings to his study a considerable fund
