Henry James and American Public Libraries, 1875-1916

This article details how American librarians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had widely varying attitudes toward Henry James’s fictions. It also shows how those librarians’ actions shaped the ways countless library patrons interacted with these works. Drawing on the expressed opinions of librarians, extensive research into the actual holdings of almost 200 American public libraries, and the borrowing records of the Muncie, Indiana Public Library, it concludes that James’s works--both from his Realist and Modernist phases--enjoyed much wider circulation and a more heterogeneous readership than previously believed.