Overview

This first volume in The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888–1891 contains 171 letters, of which 119 are published for the first time, written from late November 1888 to April 20, 1890. These letters continue to mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, engage with timely political and economic issues, and maximize his income, which included hiring an agent. James details his work on The Tragic Muse, “Mrs. Temperly,” “An Animated Conversation,” “The Solution,” and other fiction. This volume opens with James in France and concludes with James on the Continent. Dee MacCormack introduces the volume, paying close attention to James’s increasing interest in the theater.

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9781496240965

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Reviews

“Beautiful editions.”—Louis B. Jones, Threepenny Review “[These are] meticulously researched notes. . . . The glimpses that the letters offer of James’s conflictedness as a writer are among the volumes’ most valuable features—contributing, as [Sarah] Wadsworth suggests, to a more humanizing portrait than ‘the master’ image propagated by twentieth-century critics. . . . Michael Anesko and Gregory W. Zacharias’s achievement amounts to a culmination; they have given us authoritative editions comprising all James’s extant letters, complete with helpful contextual information.”—Rafael Walker, Edith Wharton Review “The series is exemplary in its meticulous attention to details of what James wrote. . . . Despite the unconventional look of this text, the edition is highly readable; and the letters are supplemented by ample explanatory notes, as well as illustrations. . . . It is the distinctively modern status of James’s work and his self-conception that is particularly interesting for contemporary scholarship, and this modernity is amply attested to in this collection of letters, many of which, of course, have never previously been published.”—Guy Davidson, Australasian Journal of American Studies “At long last we now have a complete edition, which reproduces James’s own corrections as he was writing the letters and gives scrupulous annotations, ending with a biographical register of all correspondence. . . . Even at this early stage we can see how James used his letters to family and friends to strike stances relevant to his planned career. . . . [These volumes] set a very high standard for subsequent volumes to follow.”—David Seed, Journal of American Studies “James is one of the few writers who could not have written a boring or imprecise word even if just writing a little letter to a friend. . . . This is a great addition to libraries of all sorts, and it should be inspiration for writers to browse through some of these letters to find another writer’s input on topics we all have to ponder.”—Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal

“Beautiful editions.”—Louis B. Jones, Threepenny Review “[These volumes have] meticulously researched notes. . . . The glimpses that the letters offer of James’s conflictedness as a writer are among the volumes’ most valuable features—contributing, as [Sarah] Wadsworth suggests, to a more humanizing portrait than ‘the master’ image propagated by twentieth-century critics. . . . Michael Anesko and Gregory W. Zacharias’s achievement amounts to a culmination; they have given us authoritative editions comprising all James’s extant letters, complete with helpful contextual information.”—Rafael Walker, Edith Wharton Review “The series is exemplary in its meticulous attention to details of what James wrote. . . . Despite the unconventional look of this text, the edition is highly readable; and the letters are supplemented by ample explanatory notes, as well as illustrations. . . . It is the distinctively modern status of James’s work and his self-conception that is particularly interesting for contemporary scholarship, and this modernity is amply attested to in this collection of letters, many of which, of course, have never previously been published.”—Guy Davidson, Australasian Journal of American Studies “At long last we now have a complete edition, which reproduces James’s own corrections as he was writing the letters and gives scrupulous annotations, ending with a biographical register of all correspondence. . . . Even at this early stage we can see how James used his letters to family and friends to strike stances relevant to his planned career. . . . [These volumes] set a very high standard for subsequent volumes to follow.”—David Seed, Journal of American Studies “James is one of the few writers who could not have written a boring or imprecise word even if just writing a little letter to a friend. . . . This is a great addition to libraries of all sorts, and it should be inspiration for writers to browse through some of these letters to find another writer’s input on topics we all have to ponder.”—Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal

Author Information

Henry James (1843–1916) was an American author and literary critic. He wrote some two dozen novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl, and left behind more than ten thousand letters. Michael Anesko is a professor of English and American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is a general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James series and the author of Henry James Framed: Material Representations of the Master (Nebraska, 2022), among other works. Greg W. Zacharias is a professor of English and the director of the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University. He is editor of the Henry James Review and of A Companion to Henry James. Katie Sommer has been associate editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James series since 2007 and has worked on the Henry James letters project since 2001. Dee MacCormack is an independent scholar and completed her PhD on Henry James in 2021 at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of numerous papers and articles on Henry James.

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