From Tess to Bathsheba, the author created strong heroines. So why did both of his wives end up living in his attic? In a new book, his biographer reassesses the great novelist’s feminist credentials
When Henry James moved to Lamb House in the Sussex coastal town of Rye, he admitted that he could hardly tell a dahlia from a mignonette: ‘I am hopeless about the garden, which I don’t know what to do with and shall never, never know – I am densely ignorant.’ He sought advice from the