Introduction

As the call for submissions to this issue suggested, in recent years we have seen a wealth of new work on the history, sociology, culture, psychology, even the biology, of reading. Robert Darnton’s now famous diagram of what he called “The Communications Circuit” illustrates the fact that we cannot fully know a book’s history without knowing the history of its readership. The name of the major professional organization for Book History, SHARP, is an acronym for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, with, perhaps not coincidentally, readers at the center. This scholarly and critical focus on reading was reflected in the many fine submissions we received for “Reading James,” so many, in fact, that we will devote two issues of the Henry James Review to the topic, Fall 2013 and Winter 2014.

Reading is a rich topic for Henry James Studies in particular. Henry James’s father called him “a devourer of libraries.” The younger man read widely in American, British, French, and German literature for personal pleasure. He read professionally as a critic and a reviewer, a fulfillment of one of his earliest aspirations: in 1867, the twenty-three-year-old James confessed to Thomas Sergeant Perry, “Deep in the timorous recesses of my being is a vague desire to do for our dear old English letters and writers something of what Ste. Beuve and the best French critics have done for theirs.” And he read as a writer, so much so that, by 1899, he was, as he playfully admitted to Mary Augusta Ward, “a wretched person to read a novel—I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself to write it, rather,” an occupational hazard reconfirmed repeatedly as when, for example, he reimagines Robert Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” as a novel.

There will always be those who find James “unreadable,” and he never did attain the large (and remunerative) readership he desired. Yet, James had and has diverse readerships. The Jamesian readers who contribute to this issue of HJR include an art historian, an American historian, and two philosophers. Essays range across pedagogy, Chinese literature, narratology, and eco-criticism. The experience of reading James is described as ecstatic, as semi-detached, as pleasurably deferred pleasure.

We have, of course, accounts of James’s own experiences of reading James, most notably in the prefaces that he wrote to the New York Edition after rereading and revising his work. We might, perhaps, cull a theory of reading from those introductory essays, and certainly James discusses at length what he hopes for from his readers. But rather than a set of directions, what James offers is an open door. He invites us in to read—to dream, to wander, to imagine—together: “What has the affair been at the worst, I am most moved to ask, but an earnest invitation to the reader to dream again in my company and in the interest of his own larger absorption of my sense?”