Was henry james gay

Slate homepage. Copy Link Share Share Comment. Whatever your reasons, you have allowed yourself to be provoked into saying outrageous things, and I have no choice but to answer plainly. This is your obsession, not mine. You dwell on a single sexual encounter that takes no more than a page in my book and is not referred to again.

Henry James’ Love Life

Henry James’s Roderick Hudson: A novel of displaced homosexuality & thwarted self-development

There is tenderness and eroticism in the letters. When he learned of the death of Andersen's brother, for example, James wrote that he wants to put his "hands on you oh, how lovingly I should lay them! Lapsley, a close friend of George Santayana at Harvard and perhaps a one-time love interest of Arthur Little , went on to a distinguished career as an Oxford don.

Kaplan’s Henry James: Wonderful yet unsatisfying biography

So plug on, things will get interesting. Henry James as a young man, photo. The question is whether he was a closet not practicing gay or quietly semi-active one — he has letters of correspondence with a few young men which show intense affection and sensuality and they visited and lived with him a couple of times.