Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture

This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James’s and Oscar Wilde’s relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself. The book also shows how these conflicting energies animated the late nineteenth century’s most exciting transatlantic cultural enterprise. Richly illustrated and historically detailed, this study of James’s and Wilde’s intricate, decades-long relationship brings to light Aestheticism’s truly transatlantic nature through close readings of both authors’ works, as well as nineteenth-century art, periodicals and rare manuscripts. As Mendelssohn shows, both authors were deeply influenced by the visual and decorative arts, and by contemporary artists such as George Du Maurier and James McNeill Whistler. Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture offers a nuanced reading of a complex relationship that promises to transform the way in which we imagine late nineteenth-century British and American literary culture.

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In this engrossing book, Michele Mendelssohn challenges the longstanding assumption that Henry James and Oscar Wilde shunned each other’s influence, James because of homosexual panic, Wilde because of dandified indifference. On the contrary, Mendelssohn demonstrates how their conflictual relationship, comprised of esteem and contempt, admiration and frustration, attraction and jealousy in equal measure, contributed to shaping the transatlantic culture of aestheticism. Written with verve, and substantiated with meticulous research, Mendelssohn’s study offers a fresh perspective on aestheticism while illuminating the obscurities of a fascinating literary friendship.

— Maud Ellmann, Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies, Department of English, University of Notre Dame