Mary Robertson Walsh (1810 - 1882)

Born 4 Aug 1810 in New York City

Ancestors

Wife of Henry James — married 28 Jul 1840 in 19 Washington Square, New York city, USA

Descendants

Died 29 Jan 1882 at age 71 in Cambridge, Mass.

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Biography

Henry James and Alice James both wrote of their mother, Mary Robertson Walsh James, as an embodiment of sweet maternity, almost divine in the execution of her motherly duties and the dispensation of her affection; and Garth Wilkinson ("Wilky") James considered his mother's weekly letters from home to each of her four sons, dispersed throughout America and Europe, the bond that linked the brothers to each other. (Some biographers -- especially Alice's -- have argued that Mary was indeed a remote parent, but her children's writing bears little evidence of this.) The adult James children viewed the passing of their mother as a natural stage in the progression of a human life, an understanding which they had absorbed from the religious teachings of their father, the anticlerical thinker Henry James Sr.

Mary Robertson Walsh, of Irish and Scottish ancestry, was born in New York City in 1810 to a wealthy cotton merchant and his wife. She was a devout Presbyterian when she met her future husband, Henry James Sr., in November 1837. A fellow student with her brother Hugh Walsh at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Henry dazzled her and her family with his discussions of religion and spirituality -- so much so that Mary and her sister, Catherine, eventually withdrew from the church which they had attended for many years with their family. In 1840, Mary and Henry were married in a civil ceremony in the Walshes' Washington Square house. Beginning in 1842, with the birth of their son William, Mary bore five children in the course of a marital union that was, by all accounts, a happy one.

Mary's devotion to her children and her wise counsel is apparent in the many letters that survive in the James family archives. On Henry Jr., she lavished praise for his writing; for her youngest son Bob she expressed concern (in letters to her other sons) about his drinking and his bouts of depression. Alice, her youngest child and only daughter, with her frequent physical and mental collapses from her teenage years on, seemed more of a mystery to her mother. Mary believed that physical activity and travel had great benefits for her "hysterical" daughter, but that books made Alice withdraw into herself in unhealthy ways, providing the young woman with little distraction from what ailed her -- a rather ironic prescription in this most bookish of American families, which Mary helmed until her death in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1882.

"It is impossible for me to say -- to begin to say," wrote Henry at her passing, "all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch..."

Sources

• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/american/genius/mary_bio.html