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A Bit of String: Rebecca West on Henry James
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 39, Number 3, Fall 2018
- pp. 247-255
- 10.1353/hjr.2018.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.