Volume 54, Number 15 · October 11, 2007
Sons and Brothers
By Edmund White
The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872
edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, with an introduction by Alfred Habegger
University of Nebraska Press, Volume 1, 391 pp., $90.00;Volume 2, 524 pp., $95.00
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS REVIEW
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
by Robert D. Richardson
Houghton Mifflin, 622 pp., $30.00
Letters of Marcel Proust
translated from the French by Mina Curtiss, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik
Helen Marx Books/Books and Co., 564 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Henry James at Work
by Theodora Bosanquet, edited and with notes by Lyall H. Powers
University of Michigan Press, 142 pp., $29.95
Henry James Goes to Paris
by Peter Brooks
Princeton University Press, 255 pp., $24.95
We now have the first two volumes of what will eventually be a 140-plus-volume set of the complete letters of Henry James. The entire collection of some ten thousand letters will be published by the University of Nebraska Press over the coming years. (The largest previous collection was Leon Edel's four volumes of 1,084 letters published between 1974 and 1984.) This set will bring together letters scattered across many different archives and from many different books, some out of print; a quarter of the letters have never been published previously. The volumes are beautiful, solidly put together, with big type, wide margins, and copious annotations remarking on cross-outs and misspellings and new words written over old ones. All the foreign phrases are translated and potted biographies of the people mentioned are supplied. If James refers, for instance, to a story he's written, the editors provide the reader in a note with the full name of the story and where it was published and when. At the end of each volume are an index, a bibliography of works cited, a biographical register, and even genealogical charts of the families intertwined with the James family.
Review, 5445 words
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