Chapter 10 - Authorship

Summary

Students of Henry James have long been aware that the most important early articulation of James’s literary and aesthetic theory, his famous essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), was written in direct response to an essay published under the same title by the English novelist Walter Besant (originally delivered as a lecture to the Royal Institution in the same year), yet the significance of this exchange in terms of establishing James’s position within a broader debate on the status of the modern professional author has rarely been understood. The name of Walter Besant has survived in James criticism largely as a token backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of James’s groundbreaking account of the nature of ‘experience’, ‘reality’ and ‘impressions’ in fiction, or as signifying a naively empiricist ‘Victorian’ realism to James’s sophisticated proto-modernism. Not only does this overlook a surprising degree of commonality in their views on the subject (it was Besant, after all, who initiated a discussion of the novel as a medium of ‘fine art’ and emphasized ‘beauty of workmanship’ and ‘style’ as his most important critical considerations), but it also underestimates the cultural stature of Besant as an antagonist. In the year preceding his lecture on the art of fiction, Besant had organized the first meeting of the Society of Authors, the last and most successful of several attempts to establish an institutional body providing material support and social accreditation to professional authors during the nineteenth century. In his lecture, Besant explicitly connects his desire to elevate the practice of fictional art with the Society’s more ambitious project for enhancing the cultural prestige and material rewards of professional authorship. Besant went on to become the foremost public advocate of literary-professional status during the late-Victorian period, a position which made him synonymous, for many contemporaries, with the aggressive assertion of the ‘rights’ of the author.