Volume 34, Number 17 · November 5, 1987
What Henry Knew
By Millicent Bell
The Complete Notebooks of Henry James
edited with introductions and notes by Leon Edel, by Lyall H. Powers
Oxford University Press, 633 pp., $30.00
In 1905, past sixty, James had written much and was eminent—at least with those who really knew what literature was—and Scribner's was bringing out his 'works' as though he were already an acknowledged classic, in twenty-four volumes bound in plum-colored cloth. For The New York Edition he had set himself the task of reviewing—and revising—what he had done since he published Roderick Hudson (1875), his first important novel, and he was also writing a set of prefaces. He was curious about his own artistic history. Where had all those stories and novels come from? What had been the 'germ'—as he called it—that had started each one and how had it been planted? How had it grown to be the thing he was rereading?
Review, 4743 words
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