This is a historical critique of Henry James in relation to nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. Habegger has brought to light extensive new documentation on James's tangled connections with what was thought and written about women in his time. The emphasis is equally on his life and on his fictions. This is the first book to investigate his father's bizarre lifelong struggle with free love and feminism, a struggle that played a major role in shaping James. The book also shows how seriously he distorted the truth about the cousin, Minnie Temple, whose self-assertive image inspired...

Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson's growth-a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production.
Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings...

A biography of the passionate, contradictory father of William, Henry and Alice James. The author counters the popular view - a view that the James family perpetuated - that Henry James Sr was a benignant man who devoted himself to the good of his children, preached tolerance, and practised self-effacement. Instead, he shows us a man who developed a convoluted personal philosophy to account for his own feelings of pain and guilt, his conviction of his essential sinfulness and capacity for evil, and his fragile sense of self. The work sets Henry James Sr in the broader intellectual and...

A brave British widow goes to Siam and by dint of her principled and indomitable character inspires that despotic nation to abolish slavery and absolute rule: this appealing legend first took shape after the Civil War when Anna Leonowens came to America from Bangkok and succeeded in becoming a celebrity author and lecturer. Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret Landon s best-selling book Anna and the King of Siam and Rodgers and Hammerstein s musical The King and I.
But who was Leonowens...