Letter from Henry James
Henry James (1843–1916)
Letter to Lady Gregory
London, February 26, 1897
Gregory met Henry James while in Rome on her honeymoon in 1880. “It was with a sudden rush of excitement I first saw him,” she wrote. “[T]he achievement of a writer was the one for which I had the most reverence, perhaps because of some unconscious aspiration.” She and James served as guardians to the orphaned son of a mutual friend in the 1880s and 1890s. In London in February 1897, she hosted Yeats at numerous dinners to which she invited prominent friends. James’s letter declines one such invitation, but registers his notice of Gregory’s enthusiasm for Yeats, the “interesting Celt” she wanted him to meet. In his notebooks James records stories told to him by Gregory as possible sources for his fiction.
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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