James (Joseph) Hanley (3 September 1897 – 11 November 1985) was a British novelist, short story writer, and playwright from Kirkdale, Liverpool, Lancashire, of Irish descent.

Both his parents were, on the other hand, born in Ireland, his father Edward Hanley around 1865, in Dublin, and his mother, Bridget Roache, in Queenstown, County Cork, around 1867.

After the war he worked as a railway porter in Bootle and he devoted himself "to a prodiguous range of autodidactic, high cultural activities – learning the piano, regularly attending […] concerts […] reading voraciously and, above all, writing.

[5] Hanley moved from Liverpool to near Corwen, North Wales in 1931, where he met Dorothy Enid "Timothy" Thomas, née Heathcote, a descendant of Lincolnshire nobility.

[12] James Hanley consistently explored the lives of men and women in extremes, that is in dramatically precarious states of fear and isolation, which tend to lead to violence and madness.

Finally, when young Fearon is dying in agony from a venereal disease caught in a Cairo brothel, his Captain smothers him.

[21] The publishers Boriswood "were advised that, owing to the book's reference to 'intimacy between members of the male sex', any defence against prosecution was futile'".

[24] Jack Kahane owner of this company was a noted publisher of banned books in English, including Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

It is not surprising that Hanley should show an interest in extreme situations, given his early awareness of the precariousness of life in the working class world that he came from.

[26] Hanley would also have sensed, very early in his life, that individual lives of the working poor and their children was of little value in a modern industrial city like Liverpool.

[29] In the 1950s he wrote some of "his finest novels", Closed Harbour (1952), The Welsh Sonata (1954), Levine (1956), and An End and a Beginning (1958), the final volume of the Furys sequence.

[30] Characters in extreme situations is also the subject these novels of Hanley's maturity, where the male protagonists, following some trauma, are both unemployed and isolated from family and society.

[31] Hanley's protagonists tend to be solitary figures and his concern is with loneliness, rootlessness, violence and madness and "he was never a political novelist or propagandist".

[33] In the 1960s, because of his lack of financial success as a novelist, Hanley turned to writing plays for radio, television, and occasionally the theatre.

[36] Hanley returned to the novel form in the 1970s, publishing Another World, A Woman in the Sky (1973), A Dream Journey (1976) and The Kingdom (1978), all of which "were positively received".

He served in the merchant navy during World War I from early in 1915 until he deserted to join the Canadian Army late April 1917.

The Hanleys left Wales in July 1939 and led "an unsettled, almost nomadic existence" part of which was spent in London, and, while living in Chelsea, in August 1940 they "experienced the Blitz at first hand".

[42] The third novel in Hanley's The Furys Chronicle, Our Time is Gone, was published in 1940, and takes place in middle of the First World War, between in November 1915, and September 1916".

[45] Two other works published during World War II, The Ocean (1941) and Sailor's Song (1943), explore "virtually identical" situations, that involve ships that have "been torpedoed and sunk mid-ocean".

The eponymous protagonist of Emily meets her husband, who is on leave after spending four years away fighting the Japanese in Burma, at Paddington Station.

[49] The Closed Harbour is set in Marseilles during World War II, after Germany's defeat of France, and the protagonist Eugene Marius has lost a ship in a minefield, and all but one of his crew, including his nephew drowned.

[52] Hanley lived a large part of his writing life, from 1931 until 1963, in Wales, and wrote several works with a Welsh setting and subject matter.

[59] There is a suggestion of the influence of the austere poetry of Hanley's friend, Welsh poet-priest, R. S. Thomas in this "elegiac evocation of hill-farm life".

[60] Following Hanley's death in 1985 there has been the occasional reprinting, including, by Harvill The Last Voyage and Other Stories (1997) and The Ocean (1999); and more recently by OneWorld Classics, Boy (2007) and The Closed Harbour (2009), both with new biographical information provided by Chris Gostick.

[61] This includes his play Inner Journey that was performed in Hamburg, Germany with the title Für Immer und Ewig in September 1966.

[63] In September 2001, to mark what was then believed to be the centennial of James Hanley's birth, a one-day symposium was held at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Hanley never achieved major success as a writer, even though he often received favourable reviews, both in Britain and America and counted amongst his admirers E.M. Forster, T. E. Lawrence, Anthony Burgess, and Henry Green.

[66] John Cowper Powys in his "Preface" to James Hanley's Men in Darkness (1931), comments: "There are few people who could read these powerful and terrible tales without being strongly affected" (ix).