Abstract

Abstract:

The production of Rebecca West’s Henry James was bound up with a turbulent period in her own life, during which she was negotiating her identity both as a writer and as an independent woman, partly in response to her long-term relationship with H. G. Wells. However, this text was much more than an apprenticeship piece. By reviewing James through the lens of a more modern sensibility, West not only affirmed that James’s fiction contained something of lasting value, she also traced a connecting thread from the aesthetic world of James’s generation to that of her own. In so doing, she identified something central to the force of fiction.

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