ABSTRACT
At the age of 55 the American novelist Henry James, who had lived a somewhat peripatetic life from childhood, settled down in Lamb House at Rye in England. ‘He had found his home, he who had wandered so uneasily, and he longed for its engulfing presence, its familiarity, its containing beauty’, as Colm Toibin puts it in The Master, his biographical novel about James (Toibin p. 132). One of James’s own characters, Strether in The Ambassadors, has a different and opposite experience at the same age. This American, when offered a beautiful home by the woman who loves him, Maria Gostrey, rejects it, even though ‘it built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over’ (James p. 374). As he explains, “I’m not … in real harmony with what surrounds me. You are’ (James p. 371). Henry James, we may say, feels at home in Lamb House, Strether does not feel at home at Maria Gostrey’s. Having a home, rather than being homeless, is in all sorts of ways contributory to one’s well-being, but feeling at home also seems an important ingredient. What, though, does it consist in and why does it conduce to well-being? An obvious answer is that feeling at home is an agreeable feeling and that well-being consists in a preponderance of agreeable feelings over disagreeable ones. My aim in exploring homely feelings is to show how such a hedonist account is over simple and throws further light upon well-being.
