Anglicanism and Henry James

James does not much concern himself with the Anglican church in his fictions (or, if it comes to that, in his life) I think. But there are some exceptions.  These include 'The Author of Beltraffio" which is about a perfidious wife who effectively  murders her son to protect him against her husband, Mark Ambient, a sophisticated aesthete and novelist a la James himself.  Ambient writes in order beautifully to capture life as it is lived. He resists sentimentalism, moralizing, romantic enhancement. And his means for capturing life for beauty is, of course, form.  Or as he calls it at one point, 'execution'—in a subtle pun.

Ambient is complicit in his son's death since his aestheticism prevents him from preventing his wife's filicide.  And the story's narrator, Ambient's young Amerian admirer, is actually an agent in the murder too since his ill-considered remarks to Mrs Ambient and the child trigger the crime.

And the wife is 'religious' at least in the sense that she's a respectable church--goer and  socializes with the local Anglican clergy. Ambient himself describes his struggle with his wife as belonging to the old old war between the Christian and the Pagan.

What is at stake here is complex since Ambient's literary aesthetic is so close to that of James himself. Ambient is unlike the ideal James writer however in two respects. 1. His interest in the exotic (he is obsessed by Italy, and goes on a tour as far as Asia). And James is dead-set against the aesthete's seduction by the exotic. 2. His uxoriousness.  And Ambient's passivity in relation to wife and its fatal consequence, may mask a certain misogyny on James's part.