Marriage and Family

He thought he was unlovable, and besides, he decided, someone as sickly as he should not marry.

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- Despite several flirtations, James, at the age of thirty-three, had never courted a woman. But when he met Alice Howe Gibbens, he was smitten. Beset, as usual, by indecision and ceaseless self-examination, James finally made a bold declaration of love, but no sooner had he confessed his feelings than he retreated. She should not marry him, he advised; he could provide “undreamed of arguments against accepting any offer I may make.”
  
  Alice, nevertheless, continued to encourage him, and in May 1878, James announced to family and friends, that he was, “in short, ‘engaged.’” They married on 10 July 1878. Alice was 28, her husband, 36; and by the end of the summer, she was pregnant.
  
  The Jameses had five children: Henry James III, William, Margaret Mary, and Alexander. After Henry and William, a third son, Herman was born in 1884, but died at the age of two of complications from whooping cough.
  
  Of all his siblings—Henry, Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice--James always had been closest to Henry (2), eighteen months younger. Their voluminous correspondence reveals the frankness and warmth that characterized their relationship. We get a glimpse of these qualities from the letters displayed here. In 1888, William effusively praised his brother’s latest novel, The Reverberator. But later, he joined the chorus of critics impatient with Henry’s prose style, which many found mannered and convoluted. “Your method & my ideals seem the reverse,” William complained; “. . .why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?” Henry, as his reply shows, was offended. Yet two years later, after reading Pragmatism, he confessed, with great feeling, that, about matters of truth and knowledge, he and William were in surprising agreement.

In this section

	Alice Gibbens. Photograph, undated.	WJ. Letter to Alice Howe Gibbens. Keene Valley [September 1876 ].

	WJ. Letter to Mary Holton James. Cambridge;12 May [ca. 1878].	William James with daughter Margaret Mary James. May Whitwell, photographer. Photograph, March 1892.

	Alice Howe Gibbens James with Henry James III. Allen & Rowell, Boston, photographer. Carte-de-visite, undated.	William James Jr. and Henry James III. Allen & Rowell, Boston, photographer. Carte-de-visite, [1893].

	Margaret Mary and Alexander James. Alvino & C., Florence, photographer. Carte-de-visite, ca. 1893.	Henry and William James at Lamb House. Photograph, [September 1900].

	Henry James. Letter to WJ. Rye; 17 October 1907.	Henry James. The reverberator (London; New York: Macmillan and Co., 1888. Vol. 1 shown.

	Henry James. Letter to WJ. Rye; 23 November 1905.