A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Henry James

This hefty book sets itself the arduous task of surveying the criticism of Henry James’s short stories. Arduous, given the sheer number of stories—112 by Albers’s count—and given the range and multiplicity of critical works regarding them. The task is simplified somewhat by Albers’s wise decision to avoid giving plot synopses and by her equally judicious employment of the textual versions found in Edel’s The Complete Tales of Henry James, thereby avoiding the complications of revision posed by the New York Edition.

There are as well some intentional omissions, themselves deserving note. Of James’s 112 tales, some seventeen have been purposely denied consideration in this volume. Some of these are put aside as being too long to be considered “tales” (and thus more properly treated as “nouvelles”) or as already too thoroughly critiqued elsewhere to include. Among them are “The Turn of the Screw,” “Daisy Miller,” “The Pupil,” “The Aspern Papers,” and “In the Cage.” Though some favorites are thus absent here, the decision to exclude them is not unreasonable, given that the expansion of the book entailed by their survey would surely be enormous. One misses, however, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Since it is so often anthologized and taught to undergraduates as a representative sample of James, its exclusion denies this book an audience of some scope. There is also a regrettable lag in publication time here. Though copyrighted 1997, this volume considers criticism only up through 1989. As a result, such pertinent works as Adeline Tintner’s excellent consideration of influences in The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James (1991) and Richard Hocks’s trenchant Henry James: A Study of the Short Fiction (1990) are wholly missing here.

The book is separated into “chapters” arranged alphabetically by title of short story, with each chapter composed of four sections: “Publication History,” “Circumstances of Composition, Sources, and Influences,” “Relation to Other Works,” and “Interpretation and Criticism.” Further, these are followed by an MLA-style list of “Works Cited” which forms a comprehensive bibliography of criticism on that particular story. In each chapter, the first two sections provide a useful compilation of background information on the story in question. Though this information is available elsewhere—in editions by Edel, in the elaborate tracings of interrelations by Tintner, in James’s own Notebooks or elsewhere—its collection here, arranged story by story, is very handy for easy reference and apparently comprehensive as well. The “Relation to Other Works” sections are of particular note in the compilation of various speculations on this subject. Thus, for example, in the chapter on “The Jolly Corner,” the intricate attempts by critics to link that story with such diverse works as “The Beast in the Jungle,” The Sense of the Past, and The Ivory Tower are explored cogently and carefully.

The fourth section, “Interpretation and Criticism,” forms the bulk of each chapter (and thus of this book) and gives rise to the thought that this volume might well have been titled A Reader’s Guide to the Criticism of the Short Stories of Henry James. Here, Albers engages the formidable job of surveying the critical responses to each story. At first, the organizational principle behind each of these sections is difficult to determine. A general tendency to chronology is evident, working from oldest to most recent, until we realize that the time references recycle, and we are following yet another chronological thread. It gradually emerges that unnamed subsections have been built into each section, subdivisions of ideas which to an extent outline the nexuses of critical debate on the story in question, but which in some cases (especially with respect to little-known stories which have occasioned no particular debate) might well be seen merely as considerations of such issues as “characters” and “themes.”

The failure to name these tacit subheadings poses first a merely practical problem—the “Interpretation and Criticism” section on “The Figure in the Carpet” alone is twenty...