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Share“The Library of America recently brought out the sixth and final volume in its series of Henry James reprints. The latest gathers the final novels: The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904), and The Outcry (1911). This publishing project spans some 30 years, offering all 20 novels published in James’s lifetime. The publisher has also given us a five-volume set of his stories that amounts to 4,700 densely printed pages. For those who still don’t have quite enough of James, there is also a fat volume of his essays on the art of fiction.
James was obsessively a writer, rarely hesitant to put into prose the slightest notion. He left behind more than 10,000 letters and voluminous journals. We know more about the inner life of Henry James than we do those of most writers, and this source material has been irresistible to novelists writing in a biographical vein, recently including Carol de Chellis Hill, Kathryn Kramer, Michiel Heyns, Emma Tennant, Alan Hollinghurst, and Cynthia Ozick. In 2004 alone, David Lodge and Colm Tóibín—two writers of the first rank—wrote novels about James, both of them focusing on the novelist’s unhappy attempt to become a playwright in 1895.”
