Hawthorne

Hawthorne is a critical biography by Henry James, written for the English Men of Letters series and first published in 1879. James was only thirty-six when he wrote it, and he was being asked to sum up the achievement of the man most Americans considered the great novelist of the previous generation. The book turned into something more ambitious than that brief.

James moves quickly through Hawthorne’s life, his Salem childhood, the years in the Old Manse, the consulship in Liverpool, but the heart of the book is a series of close readings of the major fiction. He thinks The Scarlet Letter is the masterpiece, defends The House of the Seven Gables with some reservations, finds The Blithedale Romance interesting if uneven, and is mostly polite about The Marble Faun. The criticism is sharp and the praise is real, but the famous passage in the book is none of that.

There is a long section where James lists the things that did not exist in Hawthorne’s America. No sovereign, no aristocracy, no church, no army, no political society, no sporting class, no Oxford, no Eton, and so on. He is trying to explain how a novelist works in a thin culture. The list became one of the most quoted things in American literary criticism. American writers from Edith Wharton to William Carlos Williams have been arguing with it ever since.

The book is short, around two hundred pages, and reads more like a long essay than a biography. For readers interested in either writer it works as a double portrait. James is figuring out his own relationship to the American novel by judging the writer who came before him, and you can hear him deciding what he himself will need to do differently. It also pairs naturally with James’s later essay on Hawthorne in his Notes on Novelists.