The Fostered Imagination

Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others

Abstract

Henry James's A Small Boy and Others (1913) is analysed, first, in relation to W.B. Yeats's Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1914); then, as an example of autobiographical writing in which the original purpose (a 'Life and Letters' volume on his brother William) is displaced, so that the narrating 'I' - James at the end of his long career - creates a narrated 'I' in the past, and descries/describes his adolescence as a preparation for the role of the artist. The book exhibits typical modes and aspects of autobiographical writing, and becomes the exemplary story of a 'fostered imagination'.