The Spanish-American War takes place.

1900During the final stage of his writing career, James’s style becomes increasingly complex and convoluted. Over the next few years, he produces what are often considered his greatest works.
1902He publishes The Wings of the Dove, about a group of people who scheme to inherit a dying woman’s fortune.
1903The Ambassadors, about an American suspicious of European
ways who is won over by life in Paris, is published, as is “The Beast in the Jungle,” a story of a man who believes he is intended for something remarkable. In London, James meets Edith Wharton.
1904 His novel of adultery The Golden Bowl is published. He travels to the United States to oversee the production of a revised collection of his most important works of fiction.
1907 James publishes The American Scene, his observations on what America has become. Publication of the twenty-six volumes of the revised fiction collection, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, begins; it will continue until 1917.
1908 James publishes the story “The Jolly Corner,” an oblique commentary on the America he has left behind.
1910 In January James becomes very ill. He is nursed by his brother William and William’s wife, Alice, and the three return to North America. William, also ill, dies shortly thereafter. James visits New York, where he receives psychiatric care.
1911 In August he returns to England.
1914 James begins work on two novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, which he will not complete before his death.
1915 James’s health deteriorates. He becomes a British subject.
1916 On New Year’s Day he receives the Order of Merit. On February 28 Henry James dies. His ashes are taken to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be buried in American soil, near his brother William.
1917 Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past are published in their unfinished state.

Introduction

The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902 in New York and London, ranks as one of the three masterpieces of Henry James’s “major period”1 (along with The Ambassadors [1903] and The Golden Bowl [1904]). Of all of Henry James’s prodigious literary output—he wrote twenty-two novels (two unfinished); 112 shorter tales or stories; autobiographical works; twelve plays; a vast array of travel essays; scores of critical essays, commentaries, and reviews of all kinds; and an astonishing number of letters to family and friends—the three late novels seem to have won the most enduring critical acclaim. They were written, roughly one a year, in a burst of creative energy from 1901 to 1904 as James approached his sixtieth birthday. The original idea for Wings was formed about 1894 when James wrote in his notebooks, at the top of a list of a dozen potential stories: “La Mourante: the girl who is dying, the young man, and the girl he is engaged to.” The popular appeal of the three late novels has never quite matched their critical plaudits. For some, the reason is that the three works are not as accessible as much of James’s other work. The novels are stylistically complex, written in an allusive and poetic prose, and they depart from the “realism” of such earlier works as The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The American (1877), The Bostonians (1886), and Washington Square (1881), and from the allegorical structure of Roderick Hudson (1875-1876).

While the reader cruises along smoothly in the realistic works, easily engrossed in the narrative as the action unfolds in a leisurely fashion, to be caught up in the “action” of the late novels is a different experience. Much more effort and close attention is demanded of the reader. The main action, indeed, is often in the minds of the characters, in their nuances of consciousness, and in the interplay of their moral sentiments. The individuals furthermore act within a framework of complex social forces and circumstances. The moral sensibilities of the characters precipitate agonizing choices for them, and yet the social context constrains the choices. The modern reader, on tackling Wings or one of the other major novels, may be inclined to echo the exasperated sentiments that William James once addressed to his brother apropos the late prose style:

You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. ‘Say it out, for God’s sake,’ they cry, ‘and have done with it.’... For gleams and innuendos and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but the core of literature is solid. Give it to us once again.2

Some friends have expressed to me the fear that the language of the late James works is so far removed from modern usage that the novels may come to be regarded as in a category with, say, a Shake-spearean comedy whose allusions are hopelessly beyond the ken of today’s readers. I believe that this view is mistaken. In rereading Wings in preparing this essay I was struck once again by the novel’s richness and vitality, the humanness of the characters, and the moral relevance of their struggles. The rewards are great for the reader who perseveres. Once you are caught up in the story, you will be swept along and you will very likely join the ranks of the James enthusiasts.

William James, in the same letter in which he complained to his brother about the dense prose in the late novels, referred to Henry’s 1907 travel book, The American Scene, as “in its peculiar way ... supremely great.” To struggle with the moral dilemmas of the characters in the late James novels is to be transformed along with them, to experience the ambiguities and complexities that are very much a part of our modern lives. William James was right—there is something supremely great in his brother’s work.