"James knew how to be generous without sacrificing the truth. What lends dignity and breadth to [his essays] above their directness and simplicity... is the exploratory reach of James's mind."
—Leon Edel
Henry James, the master novelist, started his literary career as a brash, often blistering reviewer, unafraid to skewer eminences like Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and continued to be a working critic for the rest of his life, driven by an unflagging desire to know what makes fiction work. James's critical essays represent an ongoing appreciation of the difficult art of the novel, searching in their consideration of story, character, and style. They also stand out as splendid contributions to the art of the essay, brilliantly argued, rich with metaphor, witty, unfailingly personal.
In this new selection of James's critical essays, Michael Gorra—the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece—draws on all the different periods of James's writing life, from his fledgling reviews in The Nation to his mature considerations of Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and William Shakespeare's The Tempest. As an overture, there is "The Art of Fiction," in which James insists that the key ingredient of fiction is not to be moral or otherwise improving but simply "to be interesting"; for a coda, "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields," a memoir of the literary New England of his boyhood. Overall, On Writers and Writing can be read as an artistic autobiography. Here we see James revisiting and revising his opinions on fiction, that exercise of heart and mind whose very meaning, he insists throughout, is freedom.
The 21 pieces take us from one end to the other trace James’s evolution from youthful provocateur to established master — from the crisp witticisms of his early prose to the exquisite intricacies of his later style.
—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
Though their subject is writing, the essays here dwell still more insistently on the limits and intimacy of conversation . . . the author is happily privy to ‘all the eagerest and easiest and funniest, all the most winged and kept-up, most illustrational and suggestion, table-talk that ever was.’
—Alicia Rix, TLS
To read On Writers and Writing from cover to cover, and in the order Gorra has arranged, is an experience that surpasses in reward any contemporary writing workshop or literature seminar.
—Katherine Chen, Daily Telegraph
Gorra is the ideal curator of James’ essays . . . Here we see classic James, as in the essential essay ‘The Art of Fiction,’ as well as his reviews of contemporary novels, expansive memorials and valedictions, and examinations of the forms of fiction.
—Nick Ripatrazone, The Metropolitan Review
Gorra is a close reader whose understanding of the unity of James’s work arises naturally from his respect for biography and history, as well as form and style. In choosing his collection, he has done honorable service not only to the study of James but to our battered culture.
—Edward Short, City Journal
