The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Middle Years, by Henry James

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Title: The Middle Years

Author: Henry James

Editor: Percy Lubbock

Release Date: June 1, 2010 [EBook #32649]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE
MIDDLE YEARS

BY
HENRY JAMES

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published November, 1917

[Illustration: From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and Fry

Henry James]

BY HENRY JAMES

A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER

THE MIDDLE YEARS

NOTES ON NOVELISTS
WITH SOME OTHER NOTES

EDITOR'S NOTE

_The following pages represent all that Henry James lived to write of a
volume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the name
of one of his own short stories_, The Middle Years. _It was designed to
follow on_ Notes of a Son and Brother _and to extend to about the same
length. The chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of
1914. They were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year and
were not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have been
corrected and the marking of the paragraphs--which he usually deferred
till the final revision--has been completed._

_In dictating_ The Middle Years _he used no notes, and beyond an
allusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indication
of the course which the book would have taken or the precise period it
was intended to cover_.

_PERCY LUBBOCK._

I

If the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere[1] that an
event occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he is
moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis.
Everything depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth--so
shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to
many different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easily
to be young, for _all_ life at the sam