A biography of the passionate, contradictory father of William, Henry and Alice James. The author counters the popular view - a view that the James family perpetuated - that Henry James Sr was a ""benignant"" man who devoted himself to the good of his children, preached tolerance, and practised self-effacement. Instead, he shows us a man who developed a convoluted personal philosophy to account for his own feelings of pain and guilt, his conviction of his essential sinfulness and capacity for evil, and his fragile sense of self. The work sets Henry James Sr in the broader intellectual and cultural context of his age. As well as throwing light on the development of James's two sons, it is also a study of how families work.