Henry James's Rewriting of Minny Temple's Letters

Abstract

H ENNRY James's orphaned cousin Mary Temple, generally called Minny, had a greater effect on his creative life than any other woman. Her early death from tuberculosis in March I870, when she was twenty-four and James twenty-six, inspired two of the most emotional and extreme letters he is known to have written. Six years later, when he began to make plans for The Portrait of a Lady, Minny's image supplied the germ of his heroine Isabel Archer, and in old age, when he wrote his memoirs of youth, Notes of a Son and Brother, she was the subject of the last and longest chapter. James built this chapter around numerous lengthy extracts from the remarkable letters Minny wrote to a friend during her last year of life. Leon Edel has conjectured that James doctored these letters, but it has up to now been impossible to confirm this, as James evidently burned the originals. Exactly how James revised them, Edel predicted, shall never know. ' But we can know. Before Minny's correspondence was sent to James, it was meticulously copied in longhand by William James's widow and daughter, Alice H. James and Margaret Mary. These copies appear to be literal transcriptions of what Minny wrote, even reproducing certain accidentals. The copies were at some point deposited in the Houghton Library, where I turned them up in January i985.2 They not only indicate that James's omissions and alterations were far more extensive than anyone could have dreamed, but they raise some disturbing questions about his use of