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284 The Henry James Review surely contributed to their near disappearance) paved the way for the success of James's fictional project. As Habegger concludes his discussion of them, "Ãœie agonists were a lost generation and Minnie Temple was dead and Henry James, Jr., was left in charge of all the independent heroines who had delighted and worried him" (149). The extended readings of The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians mat conclude Henry James and the "Woman Business" are masterfully subtle weavings of the three main strands of Habegger's argument, too complex and demanding to receive adequate summary here. Most interesting, however, is Habegger's sensitivity to the stresses in James's career and his perceptive locations of fault lines in James's fictional works. In botÃ-i these texts (as well as in Watch and Ward) Habegger discovers fictional dynamics traceable simultaneously to James's vexed relationships to his faüier, to Minnie Temple, and to the agonist female novelists of midcentury. Habegger's negotiation of characters such as Isabel Archer and Verena Tarrant is remarkably informed and powerful and should generate a rash of revisionary assessments of these works. Interesting as well is the psychoanalytic bent to his discussions that enables him to suggest, say, that Daniel Touchett and Gilbert Osmond are James's way of splitting üie benign from the oppressive and sinister traits mat comprised the elder James's personality and influence on his son. However, as productive as Habegger's psychoanalytic excursions can be, they occasionally result in some fairly schematic and reductive moments. Habegger is most deft when resisting simple equivalences between pressures on and in James's life and practices within his fictional texts. As he clarifies it, "James's career as a fiction writer began not wilh any sort of direct transcription of his experience but with just the opposite—a remarkably polished effort to put his own experience totally out of the question" (170). And yet James's own experience is everywhere pressuring his fictional work, deflecting and, in one of the main themes of Habegger's study, "correcting" the personal lives and fictional works that constitute an immense archive for James's thinking about women. Much like David Reynolds's work in Beneath the American Renaissance, Habegger's has unearthed a wealth of precursor texts, cultural and political subtexts, and familial and biographical complexities that should inform (mat could literally create) a new generation of work on James. Indeed, one could hardly fault Habegger for not pushing his study to include later Jamesian texts, especially novels such as The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, and short fictions such as "The Altar of the Dead" and "The Beast in die Jungle." As Habegger concludes, "the story of James and the 'woman business' is . . . not over" (238). Russell J. Reising Marquette University Robert L. Gale. A Henry James Encyclopedia. New York: Greenwood, 1989. 791 pp. $95.00. Encyclopedias are traditionally written by unimaginative members of the lunatic fringe. Fans of Michael Innes's hero Sir John Appleby will remember his eccentric cousin-by-marriage, Everard Raven, who spends his whole life devoted to making a one-man encyclopedia that never gets done. The idea presented there is that die enterprise of making an encyclopedia has to be the work of a team, not of one man. But then Michael Innes (J. I. M. Stewart) never met Robert Gale. We of the Henry James Society know tiiat only an encyclopedic mind like Gale's, with a swarm of previous volumes (lives ranging from the nineteenth-century American sculptor Thomas Crawford, father of F. Marion Crawford, to Western writers like Louis L'Amour, and critical studies ranging from analytical works like The Caught Image to the valuable index and précis of Plots and Characters in the Fiction of Henry James), would be able in three short years Book Reviews 285 to amass such a marvelous Baedeker to Ãœie continent that is Henry James. But unlike a Baedeker, Gale manages to inform diese eight hundred pages with his own infectious enthusiasm for lists, a foible he let us share wilh him in Plots and Characters. Bob Gale is...

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