Henry James

Two outstanding books demonstrate how queer theory unsettles identity politics. Henry James’s resistance to heteronormativity, we learn, has broad implications for both our construction of literary history and our practice of criticism. Michael Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master elucidates the self-censorship of those who kept James confined in “the Edwardian closet” while transforming him into an icon of high culture, and Kevin Ohi’s Henry James and the Queerness of Style highlights the author’s unorthodox aesthetic strategies, revealed through the often neglected discipline of close reading. Significantly, this year’s special issue of the Henry James Review deals with Ohi’s predecessor Leo Bersani, whose seminal critique A Future for Astyanax (1976) alludes to a mythological figure embodying pure potentiality. (Because of its connection with Ohi’s study and the interrelations of its articles, I shall treat this issue as a unified collection in section iii.) A new anthology on James and the supernatural illuminates narratives beyond The Turn of the Screw. Also notable is the work of recent editors who have made primary texts accessible not only to other scholars but also to the wider audience James strove to cultivate.

i Editions, Letters, Biographical Studies

Veteran scholar Adrian Poole has edited and annotated a text of Washington Square designed for classroom use (Oxford, 2010). Poole’s introduction (pp. vii–xvii) emphasizes the novel’s creation of a “murkier, messier, more treacherous” world than Dr. Sloper can imagine, despite his seeming proximity to James and the narrator. Appendices reprint James’s notebook entry and discuss modern stage and film adaptations. Another richly annotated volume is Philip Horne’s edition of The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin), with its comprehensive introduction (pp. xiii–xxxviii) and aids to interpretation (including an analysis of the novel’s time scheme). Horne’s choice of the 1882 text will appeal to today’s students, allowing them to imagine the experience of James’s original readers.

A valuable contribution to scholarship is Peter Collister’s two-volume text of James’s autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others: A Critical Edition and Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition (Virginia). The apparatus includes explanatory footnotes, conveniently located; a chronology of James’s early years; genealogical charts of the families of both Henry Sr. and Mary Walsh James; brief biographies of family and friends; and even outlines summarizing the chapters in James’s narratives, which will be welcomed by readers who may lose track of events amid the intricacies of the author’s late prose. Enhancing the volumes are Collister’s introductions and appendices. The prefatory essay on Small Boy deals with a number of key topics, especially James’s creation of a personal myth of “salvation through style.” The addendum, two unpublished pages of this text, recounts what James calls “a queer little tragedy” that unfolded as he tried, without success, to offer candy to another boy who had suffered some nameless humiliation. The introduction to Notes and Middle Years underscores James’s effort to assert “magisterial control” through strategic omissions and the “cavalier” editing of family letters. An appendix comprising transcripts of 23 of Minny Temple’s letters to family friend John Chipman Gray invites readers to compare these with James’s edited versions in the final chapter of Notes. (In a typical gesture, James destroyed the letters after he had used them, but copies had been made by Alice Gibbens James and her daughter Margaret.) James’s Minny, observes Collister, appears to be “more formal, earnest, and grammatically correct” than she was in reality.

Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias continue their edition of the correspondence with The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876, Volume 3 (Nebraska). James’s shifting views of Paris, his home during these years, foreshadow the ambivalence he ascribed to Strether in The Ambassadors. Even more interesting are his appraisals of other writers. Though his description of Gustave Flaubert as a “simple, kindly, elderly fellow” may seem condescending, he admitted that “Flaubert’s person has raised my estimate of his works.” His favorite author was Ivan Turgenev, whom he...