Leon Edel
Leon Edel | |
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| Born | 9 September 1907 Pulitzer Prize for Biography |
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Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was an American/Canadian
The
Life and career
Edel was born in
Though he wrote on
The discovery of impassioned but inconclusive letters written in 1875–1876 by James to the Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, while Edel was deep in the process of finishing his biography caused an ethical crisis; his decision was to continue to ignore what he considered a peripheral aspect of the self-identified "celibate" and sexually diffident James's life. Edel did treat James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen at length, especially in volumes three and four of the biography. After weighing all the evidence, Edel confessed that he was unable to decide whether James experienced a consummated sexual relationship. Although later scholarship and new materials have called into question the accuracy of his portrait of James,[9][10] Edel's work remains an important source for studies of the author.
In October 1996, about a year before Leon Edel died, Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master (in 2007 Novick also published Henry James: The Mature Master). Novick's volume "caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles"[11] as, like other more recent biographies of Walt Whitman and John Singer Sargent, it challenged the notion, deriving from a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was non-existent, that James lived a celibate life. Novick also criticized Edel for following a discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."[11] The difference of views led to a series of exchanges between Edel and Novick that were published by Slate.[12]
- "A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip." — Leon Edel
Selected bibliography
- Henry James: The Untried Years 1843–1870 (1953)
- Henry James: Selected Fiction (Everyman's Library [New American Edition], no. 649A, 1953)
- The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950 (1955)
- Literary Biography (1957)
- Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
- Henry James: The Middle Years 1882–1895 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39669-6
- Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895–1901 (1969) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
- Henry James: The Master 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
- A Bibliography of Henry James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence and James Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
- Henry James Literary Criticism – Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-22-4
- Henry James Literary Criticism – French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-23-2
- Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984) ISBN 0-393-01882-2
- The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (1987) (editor, with ISBN 978-0-19503782-1
- The Complete Plays of Henry James (1990) (editor) ISBN 0-19-504379-0
- The Visitable Past: A Wartime Memoir (2000) ISBN 0-8248-2431-8
Reviews
- Writing Lives: Principia Biographica - briefly noted in The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94
References
- ^ a b "Leon Edel". pabook.libraries.psu.edu. Archived from the original on 11 March 2012. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
- ^ Garnett, Richard; Adam Smith, Janet (11 September 1997). "Obituary: Professor Leon Edel". The Independent.
- ^ "Leon Edel | American critic and biographer". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
- ^ "Leon Edel Biography". www.infoplease.com. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
- ^ Pace, Eric (8 September 1997). "Leon Edel, 89, Prize-Winning Biographer of Henry James, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 January 2023.
- ^ "Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies Records, 1958 - 1969. Wesleyan University, June 2008". Wesleyan.edu. Archived from the original on 14 March 2017. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
- ^ "Biography or Autobiography". Past winners and finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-19.
- ^ "National Book Awards 1963". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
- ^ a b Anesko, Michael (2012). Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. Stanford University Press.
- ^ Tóibín, Colm (20 February 2016). "Colm Tóibín: how Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet". The Guardian.
- ^ ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
- ^ "Henry James' Love Life". Slate. 19 December 1996.
External links
- Leon Edel biography at University of Saskatchewan archives Archived 20 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- Jeanne McCullough (Winter 1985). "Leon Edel, The Art of Biography No. 1". The Paris Review. Winter 1985 (98).
- Edel responds to the biography detailing James' alleged homosexual attachment: Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James, The Young Master 1996
- Novick answers
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