by David Lodge
In the course of my researches I learned some facts about the subsequent lives of Henry James’s servants which may be of interest to readers of this book. It would appear that the trio went to America to work for Billy James and his wife Alice (née Runnels) in September 1916. Burgess returned to England and was married in 1930 to Ethel May Chapling. According to Mrs Davidson, Ethel was not much liked by his family, who suspected her of marrying Burgess for his money, and he said later it was ‘the worst thing he ever did’. From 1934 they lived at a cottage in Peasmarsh, near Rye, where Burgess raised greyhounds. The marriage was evidently childless. Ethel died around 1960, and Burgess subsequently moved back into Rye, where he died in 1975, at the age of 89. According to an obituary in The Sussex Express and County Herald he went back to America on several occasions to visit members of the James family, and he seems to have been in regular correspondence with Mrs Alice Runnels James – there are three letters from him to her written in 1956, the year before she died, in the Houghton Library at Harvard. In one he says he hopes to make a day-trip to some unspecified place to see Minnie, who is suffering badly from arthritis, and in another that he has had a letter from her and that things are very difficult for her as she has to look after an older sister, ‘82 or 3 I think who lives in the same building and who she feels responsible for, she says her relations take no notice of their old aunts and all are doing fairly well. She was too good-natured and let them sponge on her when she came home from America.’ I infer that Minnie Kidd never married.
I first made a note about the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier as a possible subject for a novel in November 1995, but I did not begin serious research on it until five years later. I started writing the novel in the summer of 2002. In November of that year, by which time I had written about 20,000 words, I read a review in the Guardian of a new novel by Emma Tennant, entitled Felony, which (I gathered) is in part about the relationship between Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson. To avoid being distracted or influenced by this work, I decided not to read it, or any other reviews of it; and I have not yet done so. A few weeks after I delivered the completed Author, Author to my publishers in September 2003, I learned that Colm Tóibín had also written a novel about Henry James which would be published in the spring of 2004. I leave it to students of the Zeitgeist to ponder the significance of these coincidences.
D.L.
Birmingham, November 2003
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