Letters

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Bibliographic Information

Letters

Henry James ; edited by Leon Edel

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974-1984

  • : [set]
  • v. 1. 1843-1875
  • v. 2. 1875-1883
  • v. 3. 1883-1895
  • v. 4. 1895-1916

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Henry James letters

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and indexes

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: [set] ISBN 9780674387805

Description

Here at last is the first volume of the long-awaited edition of Henry James letters by the world's foremost Jamesian scholar, Leon Edel. James was a superlative letter-writer; his correspondence constitutes one of the greatest self-portraits in all literature. In this edition Edel, respecting James's view that only the best of a writer's letters deserve publication, skims the cream of the fifteen thousand letters collected or discovered, many by the biographer himself, since the novelist's death in 1916. In Volume I, the first of four, he provides a General Introduction and a necessary minimum of annotation, and prefaces each section-Boyhood and Youth; Beginnings; The Grand Tour; A Season in Cambridge; Travel and Opportunity; and The Choice-with an informative account of James's attitudes and activities during the period in question. The volume closes, appropriately, with James's decision in 1875, at age thirty-two, to move permanently to Europe.

Table of Contents

Introduction Brief Chronology 1. Boyhood and Youth 1843-1861 2. Beginnings 1861- 1868 3. The Grand Tour 1869-1870 4. A Season in Cambridge 1870-1872 5. Travel and Opportunity 1872-1874 6. The Choice 1874-1875 Index
Volume

v. 2. 1875-1883 ISBN 9780674387812

Description

In this, the second volume of Leon Edel's superb edition of the letters, we see Henry James in his thirties, pursuing his writing in Paris and London and finding his first literary successes in Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. The letters of these years, describing for family and friends in Boston the expatriate's days, reveal the usual wit and sophistication, but there is a new tone: James is relentlessly building a personal career and begins to see himself as a professional writer. Few other letters so fully document the process of an artist in the making. James was a social success in London: in Mr. Edel's words, "England speedily opened its arms to him, as it does to anyone who is at ease with the world." The letters of this period pull us into the atmosphere of Victorian England, its drawing rooms, manors, and clubs, and James's keen American eyes give us views of this world probably unique in our literary annals. He used these observations to forge his great international theme, the confrontation of the Old and New Worlds.

Table of Contents

Introduction Brief Chronology 1. The Siege of Paris, 1875-1876 2. The Bachelor of Bolton Street 1876-1878 3. A Reasonable Show of Fame 1879-1881 4. Homecomings 1881-1883 Index
Volume

v. 3. 1883-1895 ISBN 9780674387829

Description

The third volume of Leon Edel's superb edition of Henry James's letters finds the novelist settled in Europe and his expatriation complete. The letters of this time reflect the growth of James's literary and personal friendships and introduce the reader to the frescoed palazzos, Palladian villas, and great estates of the Roseberys, the Rothschilds, the Bostonian-Venetian Curtises, and the Florentine-American Boott circle. In all his travels, James closely observes the social scene and the dilemmas of the human beings within it. During this fruitful period he writes The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, and some thirty-five of his finest international tales. Undermining his success, however, are a devastating series of disappointments. Financial insecurity, an almost paraniod defensiveness following the utter failure of his dramatic efforts, and the deaths of his sister, his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, and his ardent admirer Constance Fenimore Woolson all combine to take him to what he recognizes is the edge of an abyss of personal tragedy. And yet James endures, and throughtout these trials his letters reveal the flourish, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the social insight that marked his genius. As Edel writes in his Introduction: "The grand style is there, the amusement at the vanities of this world, the insistence that the great ones of the earth lack the imagination he is called upon to supply, and then his boundless affection and empathy for those who have shown him warmth and feeling." In an appendix Mr. Edel presents four remarkable unpublished letters from Miss Woolson to James. These throw light on their ambiguous relationship and on James's feelings of guilt and shock after her suicide in Venice.

Table of Contents

Introduction Brief Chronology 1. Search for an Anchorage 1883-1886 2. Italian Hours 1886-1887 3. A London Life 1887-1890 4. The Dramatic Years 1891-1895 Appendix Four Letters form Constance Ferimore Woolson to Henry James Index
Volume

v. 4. 1895-1916 ISBN 9780674387836

Description

This volume, the conclusion of Leon Edel's splendid edition, rounds off a half century of work on James by the noted biographer-critic. In the letters of the novelist's last twenty years a new Henry James is revealed. Edel's generous selection shows us, as he says, a "looser, less formal, less distant" personality, a man writing with greater candor and with more emotional freedom, who "has at last opened himself up to the physical things of life." The decade embracing the turn of the century is the most productive period of James's career. Happily settled in an English country house and now dictating to a typist, he is able to write The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl in three years. The letters show clearly how his fiction turned from his world-famous tales of international society to the life of passion in his last novels. His new friends and correspondents include Conrad, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, and several young men to whom he writes curious, half-inhibited love letters. Mrs. Wharton, with her chauffered "chariot of fire," introduces him to the thrill of motoring and welcomes him into her cosmopolitan circle; to him she embodies the affluence and driving energy of the America of the Gilded Age. For the first time in over twenty years he revisits his homeland, traveling not only in the East but through the South to Florida and west to California. He is dismayed by the materialism he finds and the changed ways of life. Back in England, he plunges into several projects; for the New York edition of his works he revises the early novels and writes his famous prefaces. His relations with agents and publishers as well as family and friends are fully documented in the letters, as are his trips to the Continent and visits with Edith Wharton in Paris. His last years are darkened by a long siege of nervous ill health and by the death of his beloved brother William. But he carries on, moves back to London, and continues to work. Among the most eloquent of all his letters are those describing his anguished reaction to the Great War. To show his allegiance to the Allied cause, he becomes a British citizen, six months before his death. The volume concludes with his "final and fading words" dictated on his deathbed.

Table of Contents

Introduction Brief Chronology 1. Withdrawal from London 1895-1900 2. The Edwardian Novels 1900-1904 3. The American Scene 1904-1905 4. Revisions 1905-1910 5. Terminations 1911-1915 Appendixes I. William James on Henry James II. Edith Wharton's Subsidy of The Ivory Tower III. The Autobiographies IV. "A Curse Not Less Explicit Than Shakespeare's Own" V. The Deathbed Dictation VI. Holdings of Henry James's Letters Index

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