Henry James, 1916–1945

This is “my” last issue of HJR. In 1995 Daniel Mark Fogel, the founding editor of the Henry James Review, entrusted the journal that he had created to me. With it, I received the chance to engage deeply with the work of the many scholars and critics who are drawn to Henry James. That is, luckily for me, a motley crew: modernists, Victorianists, critical theorists, cultural historians, philosophers, art historians, film scholars, those working in gay studies and queer theory, marxist and psychoanalytic critics, archival and textual scholars—the list goes on and continues to expand into newer areas like media studies. At first I worried that editing a journal would keep me away from “my” work. But editing has turned out to be less a distraction and more a conversation with those who think about and with Henry James’s writing.

I have been helped, or perhaps more accurately, guided, in the work of the journal by two Managing Editors, Isabel Buck McEachern, whose organization of our office and procedures put us on a firm footing, and Joanne Webb, whose tenure as a Jamesian is nearly as long as my own. As contributors to the journal have learned, Joanne, who is involved with the work of the journal at every step, is nothing less than a superb editor.

Essential too has been the assistance of the many excellent Henry James Fellows who have joined us over the years. Then there are the members of the Editorial Board who not only lent their time and expertise to the regular reading of submissions but also acted as judges for the yearly Leon Edel Prize. And colleagues not on the Board have been generous as well.

We have relied on high standards set—and met by—the staff at Johns Hopkins University Press, led by Bill Breichner. The accessibility provided by HJR’s participation in Project Muse has multiplied and broadened our readership.

I know that others in the Jamesian community share my happiness in the fact that Greg Zacharias is the new Editor of the Henry James Review. Greg, who is the Director of the Center for Henry James Studies, Co-Editor of the Complete Letters of Henry James, and former Executive Director of the Henry James Society, as well as a generous colleague, could hardly be better qualified for the job. He has already begun with a call for the next special issue on “Emotion, Feeling, Sentiment in James.” I look forward to reading it.