A Companion to Henry James ed. by Greg W. Zacharias (review)

In his introduction to this rich, stimulating, and wide-ranging collection, Greg Zacharias references the title's metaphor of the book-as-companion to frame what follows as "an invitation, a 'way in,' to the unending conversation that is Henry James studies" (2), a "conversation among companions" (1). It is tempting to pursue this metaphor further, to think of James's own literary interest in the imaginative potential of the companion, embodied in remarkable, invested characters that crop up across his fiction, such as Alice Staverton, who shares "communities of knowledge" with Spencer Brydon (SL 552); Fleda Vetch, whose "intelligent" "sympathy" enables her to "read deep into the matter" of Mrs. Gereth's dispossession (SP 13); or Maria Gostrey, who presents herself as "a general guide—to 'Europe,'" "a companion at large," promising archly that "there's nothing I don't know" (AB 65-66). A guide to that enigmatic continent, "James," this volume contains contributions that are, like these fictional companions, acutely perceptive, alert to social and linguistic nuances, and playful and imaginative, yet informed by an insider's deep knowledge.

Considered together, these essays provide strong evidence indeed of the vitality and sophistication of recent James scholarship. They demonstrate compellingly that the author remains a highly productive analytical category in literary studies—especially when the author is Henry James. By combining subtle, insightful analysis of James's writings with approaches that open out into provocative cultural and theoretical contexts, they demonstrate the inadequacy of critical distinctions between author-centered analysis and cultural studies or theory. In what follows, I will focus on some exemplary essays, though there are many others that deserve recognition as well.

The collection is divided into two large sections, "Fiction and Non-Fiction" and "Contexts for Reading Henry James." One might wish for more specific topical or thematic subsections in order to make groupings of essays more apparent, especially given the book's considerable size—twenty-eight essays spanning over five-hundred pages. But a chief strength of many of these essays is their agile cross-referencing of different topics, theories, and contexts, making it difficult to categorize them easily. In fact, most of the essays would fit just as well under "texts" or "contexts."

For example, in the first section, Sarah Wadsworth's essay, "What Daisy Knew: Reading Against Type in Daisy Miller: A Study," examines James's novella in light of the surge in women's travel writing after the Civil War and the fascination in the period with social "types" determined by gender, race, and nationality. Reading "Daisy Miller" alongside writing about women's travel by Louisa May Alcott and Alice Bartlett, Wadsworth argues persuasively that, even as James's story fashions a provocative new feminine "type" in its title character, its heightening of tensions surrounding class and sexuality makes social definitions more problematic. Recent critical assessments demonstrate that the novella "redraws various boundaries," so that "far from an entrenchment of the existing ideology of types, [it] actually critiques the practice of pigeonholing individuals" and "'typing' groups of people" (46). Wadsworth's essay illustrates another consistent strength of this collection: its emphasis on situating Jamesian texts and problems within a detailed account of their critical history.

In her terrific essay, "Henry James and the Sexuality of Literature," Natasha Hurley traces the critical genealogy of queer theory in James studies, from its "prehistory" in early work on sexuality in James to its flourishing "after Sedgwick" and on to promising recent trends. Hurley argues that James's writing has not just been an especially productive body of texts read "through the lens" of queer theory; rather, acute critical readings of James have transformed "the ways we read sexuality," and "expanded queer theory's understanding of itself" (310). As Eve Sedgwick's landmark essay on "The Beast in the Jungle" illustrates, queer theoretical work on James has paid attention as much to the form of James's writing as its content, locating sexual meaning in gaps, elisions, and catachreses...