“The Jamesian Condom – ‘either fluted and embossed…or else smooth and dreadfully plain’: Placing and Protecting Henry James”
As you might have gathered from my title, these final remarks about “placing” Henry James address that topic in grossly material terms. The “placing” in which I’m most interest concerns the disposition of Henry James’s literary remains: the assemblage of the James Family Archive and the rather extraordinary kinds of restrictions that, for so many, many years, prevented so many, many scholars ever from accessing the Master’s surviving letters, notebooks, and other collateral manuscripts. From the very beginning – even, really, before James’s death in 1916 – members of the family were determined to exercise a kind of custodial prophylaxis with respect to their extraordinary literary inheritance. The history of their practice – and the consequences their prerogatives entailed – are the subjects on which I shall focus.
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