Henry James in Context by David McWhirter, ed. (review)

Sometimes a byword for deceit, evasion, manipulation, padding, plagiarism, “in context” often has a depressing ring. David McWhirter’s Henry James in Context lifts the phrase, and his readers, away from such grim connotations. Not only a sober, practical guide to the requirements of James studies in the twenty-first century, this collection also displays abundant examples of elegant writing, trenchant reading, and playful thinking. “Contexts change,” Merle Williams writes in her entry on “Ethics,” “whether to break from or overlap with previous contexts” (161). Williams’s comment encapsulates the knowing, lively, and reflective stance David McWhirter’s book takes to its potentially grinding focus.

The first of the book’s three impressive parts, “Life and Career, Times and Places,” marks out the vital perimeters of the Jamesian ground. Four main geographical arenas of James’s life and career (nineteenth-century America, nineteenth-century Europe, Victorian England, and fin-de-siècle London) are laid out with lucid and nuanced good sense by, respectively, Andrew Taylor, Millicent Bell, Priscilla Walton, and Michael Levenson. The first sign that the book is doing something refreshingly vibrant with “context” is evident in McWhirter’s decision to regard James’s writing as a context for itself. The most prominent example of this is Sheila Teahan’s chapter on James’s career-long “deep engagement” with autobiography and biography. Teahan emphasizes and quotes James’s own oblique theory of autobiography as both agony and miracle, outlined in Notes of a Son and Brother, where he asserts that he “had to turn nothing less than myself inside out” (61). In his chapter on the letters and notebooks, Philip Horne emphasizes James’s wise sense of the often unreliable nature of the notebooks as a source. Yet, motivated by the success of the ongoing Complete Letters project, Horne also emphasizes the extent to which “a close reading of an [End Page E-1] unfamiliar letter (or even a rereading of a known one) can be a revelation” (75). So, for Horne, the interest of James’s play Guy Domville lies not in its much-mythologized failure, something Horne describes as “in fact only relative,” but in the many letters of gratitude and reply that James found himself obliged to write as commiseration after commiseration arrived from friends and acquaintances (76).

Pierre Walker rounds off this section with an outline of the dynamics of the James family. He writes:

The point … is not that biographers are wrong to psychoanalyze or pathologize the Jameses, but to emphasize the need for a more varied understanding of the family, one that counterbalances the familiar James psychodrama with the family’s intimate, loving, playful and intellectual qualities—that allows for the dysfunction and for the Jameses’ humour, tenderness, sensitivity and affection.

(83)

The book’s third part maps out with sober, speedy light the journey of Jamesian criticism, from T. S. Eliot to Bill Brown, via new critical, feminist, and deconstructive agendas. This journey takes in publishing history, contemporary reception, and critical responses to James from early squabbles over his national affiliation and (dis)loyalty provoked by figures such as T. S. Eliot, Percy Lubbock, and Van Wyck Brooks. All of this is narrated with masterly detail and verve by Linda Simon and Michael Anesko. The relationship of James studies to various theoretical “turns” (queer, historicist, etc.) is ably narrated by Jonathan Freedman. This section also covers forms of critique that seem, as Gert Buelens would have it, to take their “theory from the Jamesian text itself” (437). Such forms are sensitive to the ways in which James’s own writing not only provides and acts as context but, in fact, resists how context can be narrativized and deployed as a suppressive tool in reading. This latter trend is best exemplified through the thing theory of recent years.

But it is the book’s second part that, for me, does most of the work of blasting a grim aura from the phrase “in context.” Over thirty-seven entries are arranged alphabetically (this part...