Henry James & the Great War

'On the author’s final years in England.' Reflections by Stephen Miller at The New Criterion

"Though James was shocked by the war and angered by America’s neutrality, he recognized that the war had helped him in his continual battle with depression. In October 1914 he told his niece Mary Margaret James, 'I have been finding London all this month ... agitating and multitudinously assaulting, but in all sorts of ways interesting and thrilling.' Percy Lubbock, James’s literary executor, recalled that 'the challenge of the war with Germany roused him to a height of passion he had never touched before ... and if the strain of it exhausted his strength ... it gave him one last year of the fullest and deepest experience.'"

See Henry James, The Pupil, in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 3, and The Beast in the Jungle, in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 59.