The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888–1891

“James is one of the few writers who could not have written a boring or imprecise word even if just writing a little letter to a friend. . . . This is a great addition to libraries of all sorts, and it should be inspiration for writers to browse through some of these letters to find another writer’s input on topics we all have to ponder.”-Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal “[These volumes have] meticulously researched notes. . . . The glimpses that the letters offer of James’s conflictedness as a writer are among the volumes’ most valuable features-contributing, as [Sarah] Wadsworth suggests, to a more humanizing portrait than ‘the master’ image propagated by twentieth-century critics. . . . Michael Anesko and Gregory W. Zacharias’s achievement amounts to a culmination; they have given us authoritative editions comprising all James’s extant letters, complete with helpful contextual information.”-Rafael Walker, Edith Wharton Review “These handsome volumes . . . [are] extraordinary resources.”-John Carlos Rowe, Resource for American Literary Study “At long last we now have a complete edition, which reproduces James’s own corrections as he was writing the letters and gives scrupulous annotations, ending with a biographical register of all correspondence. . . . Even at this early stage we can see how James used his letters to family and friends to strike stances relevant to his planned career. . . . [These volumes] set a very high standard for subsequent volumes to follow.”-David Seed, Journal of American Studies “The series is exemplary in its meticulous attention to details of what James wrote. . . . Despite the unconventional look of this text, the edition is highly readable, and the letters are supplemented by ample explanatory notes, as well as illustrations. . . . It is the distinctively modern status of James’s work and his self-conception that is particularly interesting for contemporary scholarship, and this modernity is amply attested to in this collection of letters, many of which, of course, have never previously been published.”-Guy Davidson, Australasian Journal of American Studies