Completists' Club discussion

Following up on the discussion in the Introduction thread.

It's unlikely I'l become a Completist. If I become an ancient person, I might have gotten to most of his novels and most of his short stories. Still, it's helpful to have the list here rather than trotting over to Wikipedia, from whence this list comes.

If someone would like to add the available collections of stories, it would be nice to see them.

Novels
Watch and Ward (1871)
Roderick Hudson (1875)
The American (1877)
The Europeans (1878)
Confidence (1879)
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
The Reverberator (1888)
The Tragic Muse (1890)
The Other House (1896)
The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Sacred Fount (1901)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Whole Family (collaborative novel with eleven other authors, 1908)
The Outcry (1911)
The Ivory Tower (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
The Sense of the Past (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)

Short stories and novellas
A Tragedy of Error (1864)
The Story of a Year (1865)
A Landscape Painter (1866)
A Day of Days (1866)
My Friend Bingham (1867)
Poor Richard (1867)
The Story of a Masterpiece (1868)
A Most Extraordinary Case (1868)
A Problem (1868)
De Grey: A Romance (1868)
Osborne's Revenge (1868)
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
A Light Man (1869)
Gabrielle de Bergerac (1869)
Travelling Companions (1870)
A Passionate Pilgrim (1871)
At Isella (1871)
Master Eustace (1871)
Guest's Confession (1872)
The Madonna of the Future (1873)
The Sweetheart of M. Briseux (1873)
The Last of the Valerii (1874)
Madame de Mauves (1874)
Adina (1874)
Professor Fargo (1874)
Eugene Pickering (1874)
Benvolio (1875)
Crawford's Consistency (1876)
The Ghostly Rental (1876)
Four Meetings (1877)
Rose-Agathe (1878, as Théodolinde)
Daisy Miller (1878)
Longstaff's Marriage (1878)
An International Episode (1878)
The Pension Beaurepas (1879)
A Diary of a Man of Fifty (1879)
A Bundle of Letters (1879)
The Point of View (1882)
The Siege of London (1883)
Impressions of a Cousin (1883)
Lady Barbarina (1884)
Pandora (1884)
The Author of Beltraffio (1884)
Georgina's Reasons (1884)
A New England Winter (1884)
The Path of Duty (1884)
Mrs. Temperly (1887)
Louisa Pallant (1888)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
The Liar (1888)
The Modern Warning (1888, originally published as The Two Countries)
A London Life (1888)
The Patagonia (1888)
The Lesson of the Master (1888)
The Solution (1888)
The Pupil (1891)
Brooksmith (1891)
The Marriages (1891)
The Chaperon (1891)
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
Nona Vincent (1892)
The Real Thing (1892)
The Private Life (1892)
Lord Beaupré (1892)
The Visits (1892)
Sir Dominick Ferrand (1892)
Greville Fane (1892)
Collaboration (1892)
Owen Wingrave (1892)
The Wheel of Time (1892)
The Middle Years (1893)
The Death of the Lion (1894)
The Coxon Fund (1894)
The Next Time (1895)
Glasses (1896)
The Altar of the Dead (1895)
The Figure in the Carpet (1896)
The Way It Came (1896, also published as The Friends of the Friends)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Covering End (1898)
In the Cage (1898)
John Delavoy (1898)
The Given Case (1898)
Europe (1899)
The Great Condition (1899)
The Real Right Thing (1899)
Paste (1899)
The Great Good Place (1900)
Maud-Evelyn (1900)
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (1900)
The Tree of Knowledge (1900)
The Abasement of the Northmores (1900)
The Third Person (1900)
The Special Type (1900)
The Tone of Time (1900)
Broken Wings (1900)
The Two Faces (1900)
Mrs. Medwin (1901)
The Beldonald Holbein (1901)
The Story in It (1902)
Flickerbridge (1902)
The Birthplace (1903)
The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
The Papers (1903)
Fordham Castle (1904)
Julia Bride (1908)
The Jolly Corner (1908)
The Velvet Glove (1909)
Mora Montravers (1909)
Crapy Cornelia (1909)
The Bench of Desolation (1909)
A Round of Visits (1910)

Other - Nonfiction
A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875)
Transatlantic Sketches (1875)
French Poets and Novelists (1878)
Hawthorne (1879)
Portraits of Places (1883)
A Little Tour in France (1884)
Partial Portraits (1888)
Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893)
Picture and Text (1893)
Terminations (1893)
The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893)
Theatricals (1894)
Theatricals: Second Series (1895)
Guy Domville (1895)
The Soft Side (1900)
William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)
The Better Sort (1903)
English Hours (1905)
The American Scene (1907)
Views and Reviews (1908)
New York Edition (1907–1909), selected "definitive" edition of James's fiction
Italian Hours (1909)
A Small Boy and Others (1913)
Notes on Novelists (1914)
Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)
Within the Rim (1918)
Travelling Companions (1919)
Notebooks (various, published posthumously)
The Middle Years (unfinished, published posthumously 1917)
A Most Unholy Trade (1925, published posthumously)
The Art of the Novel : Critical Prefaces(1934)

Nonfiction

The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting & the Drama 1872 - 1901 (1948)

Drama

The Complete Plays of Henry James (1949, reprinted 1991)

Includes a 1913 monologue written for Ruth Draper, who never performed it.

I have read 17 of James's novels, everything except Watch and Ward, Confidence, The Reverberator, the Outcry, the Whole Family and the Sense of the Past.

In my judgment his best (in chronological order):

Washington Square
Portrait of a Lady
The Bostonians
Princess Casamassima
Spoils of Poynton
The Wings of a Dove
The Golden Bowl

I've also read a good chunk of the novellas and short stories. However, I've read zero of the nonfiction. The master probably had a bunch of hidebound opinions I'd rather not know about.

I would agree that Portrait of a Lady is his unsurpassed masterpiece, and maybe the greatest novel ever written in English.

I like all phases of James. His middle period is often underrated. Princess C and the Bostonians may defy your understanding of the kind of author he was. The one is about anarchists in London, the other's a great lesbian tragedy.

Late James is a completely different author. Wings of the Dove and Golden Bowl are his most complex, philosophically rich books. I'd put them slightly ahead of the Ambassadors, but all his novels are very much worth reading.

I rather doubt that I'll ever be a James completists either, but having said that I have read a big chunk of his oeuvre, including:

Roderick Hudson (1875)
The American (1877)
The Europeans (1878)
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)

And the two-volume Everyman's editions of his collected short stories. I've also read some of his travel writings and literary criticism essays.

I would also wholeheartedly endorse David's excellent comments and his list of Henry James's best novels. I, too, think that Portrait of a Lady may well be the finest novel in the English language! I am in my very late-fifties, and I have to confess that The Ambassadors was a pretty special novel for me (I could really identify with Strether, I guess).

The Henry James character I most identify with would either be Hyacinth Robinson (from Princess C) or Kate Croy (Wings of the Dove) -

It's good to see Princess C being talked about... So brilliant, and so underrated.

I'm up to 8 novels. I just read The Outcry, although really I found it nearly unreadable.