Mastered in every detail

The stories of Henry James are full of descriptions of country houses. Jeremy Musson explores the messages these houses convey, with the help of specially commissioned drawings by Matthew Rice

- Jeremy Musson

IN English Hours (1905), Henry James suggested that ‘the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house’ was the only thing the English had ‘mastered completely in all its details’. Born in 1843 in New York, James had a cosmopolitan upbringing that included long periods in Europe. By his early thirties, he was living in Paris, before settling in England in the 1870s and becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1915, the year before his death. A successful, well-connected author, he had become an experienced country-house visitor. He was not always impressed. After staying at Eggesford Manor, Devon, he observed in a letter to his father that: ‘The whole thing is dull... there is nothing in the house but pictures of horses—awfully bad ones at that.’

The country house was one of his favourite settings for novels and short stories and he often drew inspiration from the houses he had visited or knew. In The Lesson of the Master  (1888), he describes ‘an old country-house near London’ with a long gallery that ‘marched across from end to end and seemed—with its bright colours, its high panelled window, its faded flowered chintzes, its quickly recognised portraits and pictures, the blue-and-white china of its cabinets and the attenuated festoons and rosettes of its ceiling—a cheerful upholstered avenue into that other century’. This is a reference to the Adam-designed gallery at Osterley Park, now in west London.