The Middle Years

The Middle Years is the third volume of Henry James’s autobiography, left unfinished at his death in 1916 and published posthumously in 1917. It follows A Small Boy and Others from 1913 and Notes of a Son and Brother from 1914, and was intended to cover the years of James’s young manhood in the late 1860s and the period of his settling into a serious literary career.

The volume as left covers only part of what James had planned to write. The published text takes the story from the late 1860s through James’s first long European journey in 1869 and into his early literary contacts in London and Paris. He writes about meeting George Eliot for the first time, about the Pre Raphaelite painters, about Charles Eliot Norton and the wider Anglo American literary world he was beginning to enter, and about his developing relationship with George Du Maurier and other writers of the period. The book breaks off before James had reached the years he most wanted to write about, the years of his major early novels and his settling in England.

The writing is in the late James style at its most elaborate. Sentences build out and qualify themselves and circle back on their own subjects, often across two or three printed pages before reaching their grammatical resolution. Some readers find this difficult in any context and impossible in a memoir. Others find it perfect for the subject, since what James is really doing in the autobiographies is reconstructing the texture of memory itself, where one thing leads to another by association rather than by chronology. The portraits of George Eliot and of the early London literary scene are among the best things in the volume.

The book runs about two hundred pages in its incomplete state. For James readers it is essential as the third panel of the autobiographical triptych, even though it does not finish the story. It pairs naturally with A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, the two earlier volumes, and with the letters from the same period collected variously in the editions of his correspondence.