Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean HowellsIn this unique and long-awaited volume, Michael Anesko documents the literary cross-fertilization between Henry James and William Dean Howells, collecting 151 letters, nearly all the extant correspondence between the two men, as well as the most significant critical commentary James wrote on Howells and Howells wrote on James. Scholars have long recognized the peculiar importance of the relationship between these two exponents of realistic fiction--their mutual respect and occasional animosity. But the record of their affinities and substantial differences has never before been so amply and compellingly established. Containing dozens of previously unpublished letters by James, and featuring a detailed biographical chronology as well as extensive interpretive commentaries that meticulously chart the development of this remarkable literary friendship, Letters, Fictions, Lives, edited to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of James and Howells, and will hold great interest for dedicated readers of their fiction and for those studying epistolary issues and literary influence between contemporaries. |
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admirable American April Atlantic Boston Bostonians brother Cambridge character Charles Eliot Norton charming criticism Daisy Miller dear Howells December delightful edition editor England English extant feel fiction give Harper's Monthly Harvard Hawthorne Henry James HJ's HJ/WDH hope Houghton bMS HOWELLS TO JAMES Howells's imagination James jr James Russell Lowell JAMES TO HOWELLS James's January John John Mead Howells July Lady Lamb House Leon Edel less letter literary literature live London Lowell magazine March Mifflin Mildred Modern Instance months never novel novelist October Osgood Paris perhaps Portrait Princess Casamassima published reader Review Roderick Hudson romance seems sense serial Silas Lapham social sort story summer tale tell things tion told volume W. D. Howells WDH's weeks wife William Dean Howells wish write wrote York young
Popular passages
Page 147 - The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
Page 99 - I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell; But this I know, and know full well, I do not love thee. Dr. Fell.
Page 344 - I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will.
Page 118 - ... la plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.
Page 147 - No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old countryhouses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools - no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums,...
Page 42 - I don't agree with you. I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should!
Page 234 - The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding.
Page 450 - My debt to you began wellnigh half a century ago in the most personal way possible, and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth — but always rooted in the early intimate benefit. This benefit was that you held out your open editorial hand to me at the time I began to write— and I allude especially to the summer of 1866 — with a frankness and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me...
Page 452 - You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift, and played with them as the artist...
Page 451 - ... was an editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and that such a delicious being as that was a kind of property of my own. Yet how didn't that interest still quicken and spread when I became aware that— with such attention as you could spare from us, for I recognized my...