A Year of Henry James: Volume II with Sheridan Hay

Exclusive First Access for Members Meeting Details: Wednesdays, 6–7:30pm ET 8/5, 8/12, 8/19, 8/26 (4 sessions) Online via Zoom This is the second of three installments in a yearlong exploration of Henry James. We’ll chart James’s recurring themes, as well as the development of the particular style and form that mark him as one of the greatest practitioners of the art of fiction in the English language. Each installment covers a different set of texts; readers are welcome and encouraged to sign up for subsequent installments when they are announced. Volume II in A Year of Henry James examines four of his notable short works. Read chronologically, each story is representative of James’s thematic and technical development and of his “bottomless ambiguity,” presenting an open-ended opportunity for interpretation and revelation. In James’s work, no meaning is fixed—nor should it be—lest the complexity and potential for multiple meanings be limited. The stories we will read are exemplary of what James’s great biographer, Leon Edel, calls the Jamesian “love of patterns and figures; secrecy and ‘mystification’”: the author’s ambition to represent in prose, to the closest degree possible, the very nature of experience. For, as James wrote, “experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne particle in its tissue.” Reading List: Copies of the stories will be emailed upon registration. Alternatively, participants can purchase a copy of Selected Tales by Henry James. August 5: “The Real Thing” (1892) August 12: “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) August 19: “The Birthplace” (1903) August 26: “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read “The Real Thing” in its entirety. A copy of the story will be emailed upon registration. We offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for our Reading Groups and Writing Workshops, covering 50% of tuition. Applicants selected for scholarships will be notified one week prior to the first meeting. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form. Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), which features a lost novel by Herman Melville, was a BookSense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Borders Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impact Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led The Center for Fiction’s Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as leading the popular Henry James group. Pricing inclusive of sales tax if applicable. Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.