Intimacy Between James & Lucy Clifford

ELT 44 : 1 2001 come the protagonists of Hamlet. Gordon's meticulous research has furnished a wealth of information about them, and she speculates both brilliantly and wisely on their significance in James's life and in relation to his art. At times, however, the detail, and the closeness of the focus, can become overwhelming, and well before finishing this substantial book one is bound to wonder whether it is not all, as the Master might have put it, un peu trop. Though it would be a gross exaggeration to describe the book as a couple of footnotes swollen to fill five hundred pages, some such unreasonable and ungrateful thought may pass through the mind of the reader. And yet the conventionality, conservatism and traditionalism of so much present-day biographical writing are such that an experiment of this kind should be welcomed. For all the shifts of emphasis brought about by the New Candour, in formal and structural terms most modern biographies differ little from their early twentieth-century or even their Victorian predecessors, and still move relentlessly along a chronological track that leads from the birth to the death of a single famed individual. It is true that some interesting variations on this method have been achieved by biographers who have focused not on the major figure but on one who stands at the head of the supporting cast—on George Henry Lewes rather than George Eliot, for example, or on Frieda rather than David Herbert Lawrence. Anne Thwaite's recent biography of Emily Tennyson comes to mind, as does Claire Tomalin's remarkable reconstruction of the career of Dickens's mistress, Ellen Ternan. The effect of such studies is somewhat that of a camera-angle from an unfamiliar, or less familiar, corner of a familiar scene. In these terms Lyndall Gordon's idea of allowing us to look at James through the lives of these two women is a remarkably interesting one, and, given her brief, it is difficult to see how the task could have been executed more authoritatively, or the narrative have been conducted with greater skill and flair. Norman Page ------------------------ Nottingham, England Intimacy Between James & Lucy Clifford Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends: Henry James's Letters to Lucy Clifford. Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm, eds. ELS Monograph Series, No. 80, 1999. 280 pp. $15.50 IN RECENT YEARS there have been a number of volumes containing unpublished letters from Henry James to various women friends. They include Rosella Mamoli Zorzi's Selection of James's Letters 106 BOOK REVIEWS to Jessie Allen (1993), as well as Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James Letters to Four Women, a volume just published in 1999 and edited by Susan E. Gunter. These women were Alice, Henry James's sister-in-law, Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, Lady Louisa Wolseley and Mrs. Frances Prothero, and the letters were also "selected." Philip Home published Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), a biography made up solely of James's letters, a technique that had been covered up by Edel's own view of how his biography had been written, using the letters as his sources. This volume under review is perhaps the most fascinating of them all. It differs from the others because it is not a selection but is the complete correspondence, although not from the original letters which have been lost, but from the transcripts made from those letters. There are seventy-one letters plus one fragment, sixty of which have not previously been published. Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends offers certain challenges to the Jamesian reader because there is a certain amount of mystery in Clifford's relationship to Henry James. Known first to his brother William after she sent him one of her stories, she met Henry in the 1890s. Gradually, as time went on, she ended up being perhaps his most intimate friend, someone he seemed to need to confide in and on whom he would drop in whenever he needed to talk about himself , even to the point of cadging a free meal from her. Their letters span the years from 1892 and lasted until James's death, becoming more and more intimate...