Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men, and: Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (review)

Scholarship on the relation of Henry James's work to issues of gender and sexuality shows no sign of flagging. As Dearly Beloved Friends, a collection of James's letters edited by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe, and Portraying the Lady, a study by Donatella Izzo, make apparent, there are still works by James that need to be given greater consideration and approaches and methodologies that warrant application. Together, these two texts demonstrate that not only do recent developments in gay and lesbian, gender, sexuality, queer, and women's studies offer important insights into James's writing, but that his own letters and less familiar short stories offer new, useful information on the man's community and society that can add greater historical sensitivity to current theoretical paradigms.

Gunter and Jobe's collection of letters can be seen as a partner text to Gunter's previous Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James's Letters to Four Women (1999). Dearly Beloved Friends offers 166 letters, many previously unpublished, from James to Hendrik Andersen, Dudley Persse, Howard Sturgis, and Hugh Walpole. In their introduction, the editors acknowledge the ambiguities of the men's relations with James as captured in the letters. Gunter and Jobe define the missives as "love letters...that frequently verge on the amorous and the erotic," although they also note that the writings are never explicit in this regard. And yet we are also told that the recipients "shared a respect, almost an adoration" for James, a summation that suggests that they generally felt something cooler than love (1). As would be expected, the letters make it apparent that James saw his relationships with these men as inconstant and not based solely on affection. At various times, one can read James as fawning, passionate, paternal, mentoring, and lonely.

To help contextualize the vacillations of emotions and the allusiveness of the author's language, Gunter and Jobe offer a brief history of conceptions of male-male affection during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For most scholars of sexuality or James, the summary will offer no new information, while some claims are inaccurate. The notion that there was an "increasingly homosocial complexion of the fin de siècle and Edwardian literary world" (2), for example, does not recognize the intensity of homosocial bonds throughout much of the nineteenth century or the growing infringement that sexological, psychological, and juridical discourses were imposing on male-male affections. This might be a problem less with history than with terminology for, elsewhere, the editors say that one cannot determine whether James was a "homosocial male" (3), suggesting that they used a different definition of "homosocial" than that made common by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work. The reference to Judith Butler's notion of performativity is similarly inaccurate (6).

In a collection such as this, however, the letters are most important and the power of the book lies in the selection, editing, and publication of these pieces. Choosing letters written by James from 1899 to 1915, the editors wished to make available a selection that gave a sense of James's changing language for and attitude toward same-sex male attraction and desire. Gunter, Jobe, and their team of assistants have done an excellent job of annotating and presenting the letters chosen for inclusion. The amount of archival work that this compilation required is impressive and the depth and precision of their research never wanes. The majority of the notes, moreover, are informative, convenient, and succinct, reflecting the editor's familiarity with James's works...