Henry James

Online Class

September 2026 - August 2027
Sundays, 3:00-4:30pm ET

One of my biggest frustrations about my MFA experience was how little we talked about style. Leading my own workshops, I’ve found that even very sophisticated writers often lack concepts and vocabulary to talk about style in anything but the vaguest terms. There are good reasons for this. A great style gives the sense of a whole life, a whole world, condensed to a voice; it’s one of the deepest mysteries in writing.

In this course, we’ll be as concrete as possible about that mystery. Over three 90-minute sessions, we’ll consider the elements that make for great style, reading short passages together to develop tools for meaningfully talking about diction, sentence structure, tone patterns of imagery and sound, genre and rhetoric. We'll consider a wide range of writers, from Henry James to Jenny Zhang, James Baldwin to Marilynne Robinson and Natalie Diaz. Each session will also include prompts to get you thinking about how to cultivate a richer sense of style in your own work.

All sessions will be recorded for students who can’t attend synchronously.

— Schedule —

1. The First Masterpiece: Portrait of a Lady (1881 version)
Sept 6, 13, 20, [no class 9/27], Oct 4.

2. Surveying Henry James: Stories & Novellas
Nov 1, 8, 15, 22

3: Innocence & Corruption: What Maisie Knew & The Awkward Age
Jan 10, 17, 24, 31

4: The Major Phase: The Ambassadors
Mar 7, 14, 21, 28

5: The Major Phase: The Wings of the Dove
May 9, 16, 23, 30

6: The Major Phase: The Golden Bowl
July 11, 18, 25, Aug 1

Limited full and half-tuition scholarships available. Apply here.
All prices in USD.