I have spent my professional life writing about Henry James, but I am still baffled by his continuing popularity. His works are difficult, not just in the later, proto-modernist novels of the Major Phase, but in his early and middle periods, as well. His emphasis on social and personal problems specific to the upper-middle and aristocratic classes seems dated, even too narrow for the late Victorian and Edwardian audiences for which he wrote. His preference for high culture and trivialization of popular culture are linked with his nostalgia for earlier, more refined periods and his typical condemnation of the modern age and many of its technological innovations. His novels are too long and their plots generally too trivial to deserve our attention. And his conclusions are frustratingly ambiguous.

Yet James persists, almost against our better judgments, for reasons that seem on the face of it superficial or at least unsatisfactory. In our postmodern era, we are nostalgic for the grace and charm of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. We are Anglophiles and cannot get enough of British culture, even though we are aware that its authority has waned with the breakup of the Empire. We love to live vicariously in the world of the rich and famous, because we wish we were they. James’s writing is just, well, beautiful and his novels aesthetically pleasing. Who can deny the inherent value of such language, style, form?

All of these claims are true, but even when taken together they do not quite explain James’s persistence in very different times and places. At least since the 1970s, British culture has turned nostalgia for the Empire into a lively and profitable commercial model, especially with such television series as Downton Abbey and Indian Summers or the The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films. Having become a British citizen and surrendered his U.S. citizenship in 1915, Henry James qualifies for such imperial nostalgia, but his American background and central themes in his fiction seem eccentric to this British culture industry. Anglophilia has a long history and was an especially guilty pleasure of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans, but the diversification of the U.S. in the aftermath of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act certainly means that fewer Americans find England to be “our old home,” as Hawthorne termed it in one of his non-fiction books.¹ As to our fascination with the lives of the rich and famous, Americans certainly have their own long list of celebrities to follow from the Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers in James’s time to the Kardashians, Trumps, and Gateses of our era.

Certainly the judgment of inherent aesthetic value is the most pervasive and troubling. Henry James’s fiction is rarely given to splendid visionary moments or soaring rhetoric unqualified by his usual irony and ambiguity. Shakespeare is often quoted, perhaps because his characteristic iambic pentameter, appropriate to the Elizabethan stage, has a rhythmic quality that lends itself to memory. Alexander Pope is also memorable and often quoted, thanks to his use of the heroic couplet. But James’s long, meandering sentences in the novels of the Major Phase, even the sentimental, often melodramatic prose of his early novels, do not lend themselves either to memory or recitation.

His reputation as an aesthetic master certainly dates to Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), in which Lubbock draws centrally on James’s prefaces to the New York Edition for Lubbock’s definition of what constitutes a great novel.² Michael Anesko has shown how Lubbock almost single-handedly created James’s posthumous reputation.³ A member of the British aristocracy, close friend of James, and fiction reviewer for the London Times Literary Supplement, Lubbock worked hard to win the James family’s approval and then “edited James’s unfinished manuscripts …; … compiled the two-volume edition of James’s letters…; and oversaw the publication of Macmillan’s thirty-five volume edition of The Novels and Stories of Henry James (1921–1923) …” (Anesko, 73). In The Craft of Fiction, Lubbock celebrates James’s scenic and dramatic methods, as well as his perspectivism.⁴ Lubbock treats a wide variety of novels from Austen and Dickens to Tolstoy, James, and Forster; most of them are judged by the criteria for good fiction established by James in his Prefaces. Lubbock’s book had a wide circulation, went through numerous reprintings in the modern period, and is often considered “the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection.”⁵ As Anesko concludes, The Craft of Fiction was Lubbock’s “own high-modernist critical treatise, which redacted – and made elegantly persuasive – the compositional principles James had (more discursively) articulated in the Prefaces to the New York Edition” (Anesko, 73). Although The Craft of Fiction confirms James’s reputation as a modernist, it is curious, even perverse, literary criticism that pays more attention to how a novel should be written than to how a good novel should be understood by its readers. Influential as Lubbock’s book was on modernist writers and Anglo-American New Criticism, its aesthetic values belong to a past generation.

All of these conventional claims about James’s lingering reputation revolve around his status as a classic writer, such as that of Shakespeare, Joyce, or Faulkner, who touches on the universals of human experience. However bound Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, Faulkner to the racially divided South, Joyce to subjugated Ireland, and Henry James to transatlantic Anglo-American cultures of the fin-de-siècle, each of them teaches us something enduring about humanity. For all his entanglements in British monarchy, Lear speaks to us as a father, whose troubled relations with his daughters have been experienced by many parents. Sutpen’s ruthless ambitions in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are tied inextricably to the sins of Southern slavery, but his passionate desire to overcome his humiliating childhood and affirm his self-reliant authority in the world are common human motives. Leopold Bloom’s Jewish and Irish backgrounds define him as doubly exiled, and his identity as an outsider can be shared by us all. Isabel Archer’s wish to control her own destiny amid the limitations placed on women in nineteenth-century America and Victorian England transcends the rituals of courtship, marriage, and child rearing to embrace the problems faced by every strong individual forced to compromise her ideals by accepting social responsibilities.