The Real Henry James

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The Real Henry James: Modern Women

Modern Women

BBC Radio 4 - The Real Henry James, Modern Women

Henry James on feminism, female suffrage and how his friendships with women inspired him.

Henry James on feminism, female suffrage, modern women - and how his friendships with women inspired him. Read by Henry Goodman.

Henry James was not only a great novelist - he also wrote a great deal of entertaining non-fiction, producing reviews and essays on a wide variety of subjects. To mark the centenary of his death, these five anthologies reveal James through his letters, memoirs, essays and private notebooks.

Episode 3: Modern Women
Henry James was a lifelong bachelor, but many of his closest friendships were with women. And his novels are known for his sensitive and sympathetic treatment of women's experience - very often as his central characters.

His preoccupation with the situation of women, and with contemporary debates about women's role in society, emerges early in his career. In 1868, the 25-year-old James reviewed a book called Modern Women and What Is Said of Them - a British collection of anti-feminist articles. The book roused James to an angry attack on the marriage market which women found themselves in, and a defence of the position of women in a patriarchal society. We hear extracts from that impassioned review. 

We hear too the moving letter which James wrote home to his mother after the death of his closest female friend, his cousin Minnie Temple. Minnie inspired Isabel Archer, his heroine in The Portrait of a Lady, and his heroine Millie Theale in The Wings of the Dove would resemble her even more closely.

The anthology has been selected by Professor Philip Horne of University College London, who is founding General Editor of a major scholarly edition of James's fiction and has re-transcribed the notebooks for an authoritative new edition.

Reader: Henry Goodman
With introductions by Olivia Williams

Producer: Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4.

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The great writer is revealed through his letters and memoirs. Read by Henry Goodman.

To mark the centenary of Henry James's death, the great writer is revealed through his letters and memoirs. Read by Henry Goodman. With introductions by Olivia Williams.

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