Henry James at Work (review)

According to Lyall Powers, one of Leon Edel's last projects was a plan to issue a new edition of Henry James at Work, the pamphlet that James's amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, published in 1924 at Hogarth Press. Inspired by their collaboration on The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, Edel and Powers planned to include in a new edition of Henry James at Work an introduction and Edel's own reminiscence of Bosanquet. Edel's death in 1997 left Powers alone to produce this new edition of Bosanquet's work, which he has augmented considerably by a preface, an introduction, a chapter on the significance of Bosanquet's pamphlet, and a concluding chapter on Bosanquet's literary career after 1920. In addition, Powers has collected selections from Bosanquet's diary and correspondence.

The correspondence includes six letters to her by Henry James (three of which are published here for the first time), a letter by her to William James's son, Henry, and part of one letter to her from Edith Wharton. Powers's concluding chapter reprints Bosanquet's 1943 Time and Tide essay, "The Country of Henry James."

Henry James at Work has always been a valuable primary resource to readers interested in James's practice of dictation and his general work habits. Powers's new edition provides useful context: the preface, the introduction, and Powers's concluding chapter are in essence a short biography of Bosanquet. These are of interest to readers wishing to know more about the woman who was probably James's closest collaborator. The diary and correspondence selections provide substance to Bosanquet's personality and to her working relationship with James. Powers's chapter on the significance of Henry James at Work does two things: it explains the genesis of the pamphlet, and it argues that Bosanquet deserves more credit as a critic of James in her own right. Powers also emphasizes Bosanquet's first-hand role, after James's 1915 stroke, in establishing the final draft of his introduction to Rupert Brooke's Letters from America (18).

The explanation of the genesis of Henry James at Work is perhaps Powers's most interesting addition to our general knowledge. After James's death in 1916, Bosanquet wrote three articles about her late employer: "Henry James" (Fortnightly Review, 1917), "The Revised Version" (Little Review, 1918), and "The Record of Henry James" (Yale Review, 1920). Powers demonstrates that Virginia and Leonard Woolf saw at least one of these essays, the one published in the Little Review, and that Virginia Woolf encouraged Bosanquet to expand it into a ten-thousand-word pamphlet for the Hogarth Essays series (22–23). Publication in the Little Review and by the Hogarth Press indicates that Bosanquet was to some extent connected with the London avant-garde literary world. And yet while contemporary writing on James by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Percy Lubbock, and others has long been recognized as formative James criticism, Bosanquet's critical "contribution has been rather overlooked," perhaps, Powers implies, because she was a woman (27–28).

The point about Bosanquet's significance as an early James critic is important, but Powers does not mention the degree to which Bosanquet was complicit with other modernists in projecting a Henry James uninterested in the political affairs of his day. (See, for example, the distinction Powers shows Bosanquet making between "cabinets and parties and politics" and "the customs of a country" [26] and his dismissal of "national identity" as "superficies" that did not hold James's "artistic interest" [27].) Bosanquet is perhaps not entirely to blame: like her contemporaries, she did not have access to James's letters (other than the few published in Lubbock's 1920 two-volume collection and those she saw when she worked for James). She could not, therefore, have known the many passages in James's early letters to friends and relatives in America that discuss the issues of the day, and she probably did not know James...