Lamb House was his again. He moved around it relishing the silence and the emptiness. He welcomed the Scot who was waiting for him to begin a day’s work, but he needed more time alone first. He walked up and down the stairs, going into the rooms as though they too, in how they yielded to him, belonged to an unrecoverable past, and would join the room with the tasselled tablecloths and the screens and the shadowed corners, and all the other rooms from whose windows he had observed the world, so that they could be remembered and captured and held.
Acknowledgements
I have found a number of books about Henry James and his family extremely useful while working on this novel. They include: Leon Edel’s five-volume biography and Edel’s editions of the letters and notebooks; Henry James: The Imagination of Genius by Fred Kaplan; Henry James: The Young Master by Sheldon M. Novick; The Jameses: A Family Narrative by R.W. B. Lewis; Alice James: A Biography by Jean Strouse; Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James by Jane Maher; The Father: A Life of Henry James Senior by Alfred Habegger; A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art by Lyndall Gordon; The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand; Alice James: Her Life in Letters, edited by Linda Andersen; Amato Ragazzo: Lettere a Hendrik C. Andersen, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi; William and Henry James: Selected Letters, edited by Ignas K. Skripskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley; Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, edited by Susan E. Gunter; The Legend of the Master, compiled by Simon Nowell-Smith.
I wish to acknowledge that I have peppered the text with phrases and sentences from the writings of Henry James and his family.
I am grateful to Peter Straus, Nan Graham, Andrew Kidd, Ellen Seligman, Catriona Crowe, Brendan Barrington and Angela Rohan for support and advice. Some of this book was written at the Santa Maddalena Foundation near Florence in Italy and I am grateful to Beatrice Monti for her kindness and hospitality.
COLM TÓIBÍN
COLM TÓIBÍN was born in Ireland in 1955 and lives in Dublin. He is the author of four novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time.
