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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2021
The Princess Casamassima was the fifth of James's full-length novels, following Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and The Bostonians (1886). As readers of the time were quick to note, it was the first of James's novels that did not feature any American characters (with the partial exception of the title character herself). It has often been coupled with The Bostonians and The Tragic Muse (1890) as representing a ‘middle period’, succeeded by James's years of engagement with the theatre and the beginning of a later phase in 1895 that culminates in The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Like the application of all such schemes to the complexities of an extended and prolific career, this risks underestimating the challenges faced by the author at the time of writing and the means by which he met them. As with the CFHJ as a whole, this edition seeks to return James's novel to the dense particular context in which it was first conceived, written, and read in the mid-1880s.
Beginnings
The first hint we have of the novel that was to become The Princess is from an exchange in July 1883 between James and the editor of the Atlantic Monthly (hereafter AM), Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907). James was in Boston, still dealing with the complex aftermath of his father's death the previous December, and indeed less than a year before that, of his mother's death in January 1882. Though he was not to know it, he had seen for the last time two other persons important to him. His friend, Ivan Turgenev, was to die the following September; as we shall see, the great Russian novelist would prove an essential resource in the composition of The Princess. And two months later, in November 1883, he would lose his younger brother Wilky, who had never truly recovered from the injuries of the Civil War. These bereavements would contribute to the temper of his next two novels.
Aldrich had taken over from James's friend William Dean Howells as editor of the AM in March 1881, a post he held until 1890.
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