Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Letters of Henry James : 1883-1895 Volume III, Hardback Book

The Letters of Henry James : 1883-1895 Volume III Hardback

Edited by Leon Edel

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

The third volume of Leon Edel's superb edition of Henry James's letters finds the novelist settled in Europe and his expatriation complete.

The letters of this time reflect the growth of James's literary and personal friendships and introduce the reader to the frescoed palazzos, Palladian villas, and great estates of the Roseberys, the Rothschilds, the Bostonian-Venetian Curtises, and the Florentine-American Boott circle.

In all his travels, James closely observes the social scene and the dilemmas of the human beings within it.

During this fruitful period he writes The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, and some thirty-five of his finest international tales. Undermining his success, however, are a devastating series of disappointments.

Financial insecurity, an almost paraniod defensiveness following the utter failure of his dramatic efforts, and the deaths of his sister, his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, and his ardent admirer Constance Fenimore Woolson all combine to take him to what he recognizes is the edge of an abyss of personal tragedy. And yet James endures, and throughtout these trials his letters reveal the flourish, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the social insight that marked his genius.

As Edel writes in his Introduction: "The grand style is there, the amusement at the vanities of this world, the insistence that the great ones of the earth lack the imagination he is called upon to supply, and then his boundless affection and empathy for those who have shown him warmth and feeling."In an appendix Mr. Edel presents four remarkable unpublished letters from Miss Woolson to James.

These throw light on their ambiguous relationship and on James's feelings of guilt and shock after her suicide in Venice.

Information

Save 15%

£97.95

£82.75

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information