On Writers and Writing

"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.