Henry James

Though humanities scholars may feel neglected as universities promote science and technology, studies of Henry James continue to flourish. His status as an international author has been enhanced by the formation of the European Society of Jamesian Studies, which joins the US-based Henry James Society in sponsoring well-attended conferences resulting in anthologies that highlight a range of critical approaches. Monographs on single authors are less common than they used to be, but an excellent book by Daniel Hannah illustrates how a familiar topic—James and impressionism—can be revitalized by a creative synthesis of close reading and historical research. “Art lives upon discussion … , upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints,” wrote James in “The Art of Fiction,” and his endorsement of multiple perspectives has secured his position in today’s classrooms. Key texts of the moment are The Ambassadors and “The Beast in the Jungle,” which have elicited readings raising larger issues of interpretive validity concerning ambiguous representations of men who resist marriage. Brief biographies by Hazel Hutchison and J. C. Hallman, as well as some inviting paperback editions, are designed to make James more accessible to students and general readers.

i Editions, Letters, Biographical Studies

A revised and updated version of the Signet edition of Washington Square features essays by two contemporary fiction writers. Mona Simpson’s introduction (pp. v–xvi) attributes readers’ interest in this novel less to its plot or its individual figures than to its intelligent treatment of thwarted and misguided love. Michael Cunningham’s afterword (pp. 210–21) focuses on the complementary theme of money in a society “shift[ing] from a hierarchy rooted in birth or accomplishment to one based almost entirely on currency.” Both Simpson and Cunningham treat James’s prose as a taste acquired by mature readers, admitting that younger ones may regard the author as “the grandmother of English literature” or as “an avuncular figure who had always lived in comfort and never married, to no one’s surprise.”

Adrian Poole has edited two new volumes in another teachable series, the Oxford World’s Classics. The first pairs Daisy Miller with its less famous complement, An International Episode. Both narratives, notes Poole in his preface (pp. vii–xxx), dramatize “the anxious negotiations, the potential alliances and disappointments” in cultures whose typology of class has been “complicated by social mobility, migration, and intermarriage.” Ultimately, both tales encourage readers to “lighten up” and accept the liberating potentiality of James’s unconventional women. The Aspern Papers and Other Stories includes “The Death of the Lion,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Birthplace.” Poole’s introduction (pp. vii–xxv) elucidates these tales’ common theme: “the attempted capture and exploitation of the man behind the artist—and in every case, his escape.” The cult of celebrity, adds the editor, inspired “a crucial feature of [James’s] writing … too often overlooked, the sheer fun of it.” These editions offer promising alternatives to instructors seeking less familiar texts along with perennial favorites.

Michael Anesko advocates further scrutiny by scholarly editors in “Textual Monuments/Crumbling Idols; or, What We Never Knew about Henry James (and Never Thought to Ask)” (HJR 34: 183–96). Even when revising his fiction for the New York Edition, the author overlooked some errors and inconsistencies (notably in The Portrait of a Lady); and earlier in his career he often lacked the opportunity to review his publishers’ proofs. “His almost super-human labor,” cautions Anesko, hardly guaranteed infallibility.

The definitive edition of James’s correspondence continues with The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1876–1878, Volume 2, ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, (Nebraska)—a collection of 75 letters, 44 published for the first time. Dominating the scene is James’s growing circle of social acquaintances, most of them of scant literary importance. “The great stock of [British] society is a collection of mediocrities,” he confided to his mother, while writing his father that his “attachment” to London was “an excellent condition for work.” He carefully monitored the reception of French Poets and Novelists, his most ambitious critical achievement, and of Daisy Miller, his most popular...