In Henry James' widely acclaimed short story "The Private Life" written in 1893, the storyteller makes shocking realizations around two individuals from his holiday party while their stay in a village in the Swiss Alps. After an evening spent paying attention to the casual conversation of the London playwright Clarence "Clare" Vawdrey, he goes up to Vawdrey's room where he sees, "bent over the table in the attitude of writing", the person that he thought was left downstairs along with his other friends. Vawdrey, it appears, is double: the first one is his public self, which as per the storyteller is troubled by "neither moods nor sensibilities", and the second one is his private life, his writing persona, which remains concealed.The conveniently charming storyteller Lord Mellifont, in the meantime, experiences the "opposite complaint". According to the narrator, Lord Mellifont is "all public", and has "no corresponding private life". Behind the immaculate mask of his public persona, there is absolutely nothing. Lord Mellifont is all just a show.
Henry James OM was an American-born British author born in New York City on 15 April 1843. He is recognized as a crucial figure in the transition from literary realism to literary modernism. Henry James, Sr., an investor, and banker in Albany, was his father. Henry James was medically unfit in 1861 to fight in the American Civil War. For The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, he produced both fiction and nonfiction writing. Later, in 1878, Watch and Ward was published as a book. He left for Paris in 1875 and arrived in London in 1876. The Portrait of a Lady (1878), was released in 1881. He relocated to Sussex in 1897-1898, where he wrote The Turn of the Screw. He wrote The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl between 1902 and 1904. He received the Order of Merit in 1915 and became a citizen of Great Britain. His memoirs A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother were both published in 1913. He received the Order of Merit in 1915 and became a citizen of Great Britain. He was cremated after passing away on February 28, 1916, in Chelsea, London.
