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Throughout his literary career, Henry James was a strident critic of the prevailing forms of biographical enquiry. This aspect of James's thought is no doubt familiar to readers of such fictional texts as "The Aspern Papers' (1888) and "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896), or of his numerous critical commentaries on writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of such references to biography and other forms of biographical representation within his writings, James's apparently excessive and agonistic concern with the preservation of an authorial "right to privacy" has rarely been taken seriously by his critics. On the one hand, this concern is often subjected to the very act of biographical reading which it aimed to forestall: following a logic which he himself often dramatised, James's endeavour to frustrate the desire for biographical knowledge is used as evidence to support the existence of such knowledge. Thus, James's most influential biographer, Leon Edel, found little difficulty in accommodating his subject's resistance to enquiry without otherwise disturbing the hermeneutic assumptions of his own biographical practice.² On the other hand, James's habitual defence of the value of "privacy" has also been viewed as symptomatic of an essentially conservative mode of cultural criticism, one which is designed to occlude the legitimate, democratic demand for openness or transparency in the field of biographical and journalistic discourse.³

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_10

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