A Calendar of the Published Letters of Henry James: Part I

A Calendar of the Published Letters of Henry James: Part I by Steven H. Jobe, North Carolina State University Editor's note: This calendar will be completed in our next issue. The lists of sources and repositories necessary for interpreting both installments appear only in this issue. We are grateful to Professor Neal W. Stoltzfus of the Department of Mathematics at Louisiana State University for writing the computer program for the tabular matter.—VM In the absence of a complete edition of the estimated 15,000 extant letters of Henry James, scholars have long had to rely on the eclectic offerings of James's friends, his acquaintances, their heirs, and a handful of devoted editors who have labored to make the more significant correspondence accessible.1 To Percy Lubbock, of course, belongs initial credit for his 2-volume edition (1920) of 403 letters, drawn primarily from the later years of James's life and career. By now, though, the commonly-consulted source is Leon Edel's 4-volume edition (1974-84) of 1,092 letters, which reprints superior texts of many of the Lubbock letters while augmenting them with invaluable letters from James's earlier years. More specialized collections have steadily increased the total of available letters. Prominent if not always wholly reliable among these supplementary volumes are E. F. Benson's reprinting of letters to his bromer and to Auguste Monod (1930), Elizabeth Robins's selection of personal letters from James (1932), Janet Smith's collection of the letters to Robert Louis Stevenson (1948), Virginia Harlow 's appendix of James letters in her biography of Thomas S. Perry (1950), Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray's compilation of the James-Wells correspondence (1958), George Monteiro's gathering of the letters to John Hay (1965), Leon Edel's contribution of several dozen new letters in the second of his one-volume selected editions of letters (1987), and, most recently, Rayburn Moore's substantial edition of the James-Gosse letters (1988).2 To cite only these works, though, is but to recite a list of sources generally familiar to any James scholar interested in mastering the Master without ransacking libraries, archives, and private collections. In truth, there are at least 113 books and periodicals that reprint 2,322 letters from 65 repositories and collections . While most of these sources are identified by Edel, Dan Laurence, and James Rambeau in Section C of the invaluable Soho Bibliography of James, their list understandably makes no effort to discriminate between or itemize the letters contained in the 285 works they catalog. 2 The Henry James Review The following calendar attempts to bring some belated order to this confused state of affairs by identifying all known published letters by Henry James, excluding fragments. The information provided herein includes the date of composition (whether positively known or conjectured), the correspondent, the city of origin, the source of the best published text, and—when known—the extant state and the repository of the original ("OR"="Original") letter. Dates assigned by earlier editors on the basis of reliable internal or external evidence are indicated by brackets ([ ]). Likely dates proposed by the present editor for otherwise undated letters are indicated by braces ({ }). In both cases, probable but nonetheless tentative dates are so indicated by a question mark. Letters that cannot be dated other than by year and wholly undatable letters are consigned to a separate list at the end of the calendar that provides all available information. Full identifications of all the abbreviated sources and repositories cited in the calendar are appended as well. Scholars interested in further information on James's correspondents are best referred to Robert Gales's recent Henry James Encyclopedia. An inclusive calendar necessarily ignores James's own opinions on both lists and letters. When subscribing to a catalogue of Edmund Gosse's library in 1893, James professed to have "no such curious lore & I hate catalogues with a personal hatred" (Moore 86). Moreover, he characterized the "best letters" of writers as "the most delightful of all written things," while "those that are not the best [are] the most negligible" (Edel 4: 123). But this calendar adopts the more generous attitude of Edith Wharton, who, when...