James's Travel Writings

ELT 38: 1 1995 unexplained references (to the Beveridge Report and Section 28, for example) that limit its accessiblitity to non-English audiences. Raitt fails to use the second edition of Moments of Being; confuses George for Gerald Duckworth; occasionally ignores chronology, having Woolf, for example, writing the end of The Voyage Out hi November of 1906, though the inception of that novel did not take place until August 1907. She mistakenly thinks Woolf reacted more severely to her mother's death than to her father's. She explains the terms of Vita's marriage as the stable basis of her identity, but she says hardly a word about the Woolfs' marriage. Raitt's catchy title "Vita and Virginia" seems out-of-sync with the book itself which refers to the women only as "SackvUle-West" and "Wootf." Possibly Raitt first wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Vita SackvUle-West, then for marketing reasons was encouraged to add the materials on Virginia Wootf as she turned thesis into book. Certainly she knows SackvUle-West better than Wootf. Despite such flaws, Vita and Virginia successfully combines literary, psychological, and historical analysis to offer telling insight into the work and friendship of these two important women. Panthea Reid ________________ Louisiana State University James's Travel Writings Henry James: Collected Travel Writings, The Continent. Richard Howard, ed. New York: Library of America, 1993. 845 pp. 94 illustrations $35.00 Henry James: Collected Travel Writings, Great Britain and America. Richard Howard, ed. New York: Library of America, 1993. 846 pp. 92 illustrations $35.00 THESE VOLUMES, a welcome addition to the admirable Library of America series, bring together over 1500 pages of James's travel essays, collected and uncoUected—a useful reminder that this writer, so prolific in so many dUferent genres, had a long love affair with the literature of travel. His first coUection of sketches appeared as early as 1875, in the same year as his first novel, and he was stUl practicing this form Ui his final years. No doubt the ready salabUity of essays of travel to magazine editors was among his motives, but he cared enough about these pieces to subject them to scrupulous and sometimes extensive revision for then· reappearance, sometimes more than once, Ui volume form. Their textual history is thus sometimes fairly complex: an essay on 94 BOOK REVIEWS Venice, for example, which first appeared Ui a magazine m 1882, was revised for its reprinting Ui Portraits of Places (1883), and was resuscitated much later, and further revised, to stand first Ui Italian Hours (1909). The present edition is based on the texts that represent the author's final intentions. English Hours coUects sixteen essays, all of which had been previously published: as the editor, Richard Howard, notes, James "carefully and often extensively revised these essays from then· earlier published versions to create a more consistent whole." His frugal habit of recycling earlier material can be illustrated from the successive appearances of the essay on Chester, an ancient English town that is also put to good use Ui The Ambassadors: published first Ui the Nation in 1872, the essay reappeared three years later m Transatlantic Sketches (Boston), appeared yet again Ui 1883 Ui the Tauchnitz edition of that volume (now helpfully retitled Foreign Parts), and at last came to rest m English Hours (1905)—thirty-three years after its original publication. The American Scene, more consciously planned as a book, was the outcome of James's return to the United States m 1904 after a twentyyear absence, and includes accounts both of places revisited and of others seen then for the first tüne. Of particular interest Ui the Great Britain and America volume is a section devoted to uncollected essays, ranging from "London Sights" of 1875 to the posthumously-published "Within the Run." While some of these (for example, a brief article on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race) do not make very compeUing reading, they provide further evidence of James's early and later response to the English scene. A Little Tour in France, serialized Ui 1883-1884, was, as usual, revised for volume publication. Italian Hours (1909) brought together essays most of which...