Henry James: A Life in Letters (Penguin Classics)

Now that the University of Nebraska Press has undertaken to publish the complete James correspondence, these one-volume samplers can be relieved of the artificial responsibility to do the impossible - that is, tell the whole story in 600 pages or less. Horne's effort suffers in comparison to Edel's by its self-imposed mandate to favor previously unpublished letters. (Personally, I found these almost invariably of lesser interest. It looks like Edel skimmed the cream.) But his cannily selected interstitial material makes it a far more rewarding reading experience. I would say this now stands as the best introduction to the subject. And for what it's worth: the Penguin Classics paperback edition is a very nice piece of manufacture - comfortably sized in dimension and font.

Unlike the previous reviewer here, I am not a James scholar. With this volume a James layman can have The Master himself as guide through his life and work. From this book I learned about all kinds of James works that I had never heard of. After I read this, I went out and bought "Roderick Hudson", and read and enjoyed that. So, in addition to being, as the title accurately suggests, an epistolary biography, this book is also a kind of reader's guide to James's work, though not an exhaustive one. In his selection of letters Horne concentrates on James's career as a writer, both artistic and financial, and as a man who knew and was friends with other writers. The letters bring to life such figures as his brother William James, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and William Dean Howells, as well as many others whose names we non-scholars do not know today. The letters also bring to life James's never-quite-successful struggle for economic success and security -- and the artistic freedom that he wished it to bring him -- to go along with the critical success that he mostly enjoyed for his fiction. One of the wonderful things about this book is the sense of transit through James's life, from the states of mind of youth to those just before death, through his thoughts and feelings; also the transit through the second half of the nineteenth century, with all its changes, and its bitter end in the First World War. The book is very extensively footnoted and indexed, and usefully and enlighteningly so. Read it slowly, a letter or two a day. [Disclaimer: I did not buy this book from Amazon, but I buy plenty of other books from Amazon!]

A very interesting collection of letters that helps to understand more deeply a complex personality of H.James. It gives us a full and vivid picture of relationships, feelings and thoughts that were reflected in James' writings. In addition, it is a wonderful example of James's inimitable style.

James is the Master of transmuting humanity into literature, whether it be in his letters, novels, or essays. A Life in Letters is a pleasure to be savoured with one or two entries a day; as if one were the recipient of these missives. Taken before bed, they may not work as a sleeping pill, but they do take the mind off of one's own cares and into another world.

In some ways this collection of letters comes closest to an autobiography of anything Henry James ever wrote (including his late books meant - perhaps only to some degree - as autobiography). Such a marvelous sense of immediate life here; editing helps to connect each letter with what he did and where he went -- useful context-building data which once again helps to give these disparate letters the contours of a biography. If you're an inveterate James-reader (I've got a thing for the whole family - I love reading about them as much as reading them), the pleasures here are considerable. Terrific book to pick up and put down and pick up and ... etc. Largest box of chocolates you'll ever encounter - with every fruit, cream and nut imaginable - and they never get stale.