Page "Henry James" Paragraph 22

He corresponded in almost equally extravagant language with his many female friends, writing, for example, to fellow-novelist Lucy Clifford: " Dearest Lucy!

What shall I say?

when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others!

Therefore I think that — if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence — I love you more than I love Others.

" To his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Jones: " Dearest Mary Cadwalader.

I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain ; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me wonder if poor unconscious & doting old Célimare pet name for James has " done " anything, in some dark somnambulism of the spirit, which has ... given you a bad moment, or a wrong impression, or a " colourable pretext " ...

However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever ; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life ... His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Leon Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon.

( Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers have strongly objected to Edel's account.