Henry James: The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901

This is the fourth volume of Leon Edel's illustrious biography, which received a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award even before it was completed. It has been hailed by eminent biographers, critics, and novelists, including Max Beerbohm, Sir Harold Nicolson, V. S. Pritchett, Edmund Wilson, Sir Herbert Read, Joyce Cary, Newton Arvin, Perry Miller, Howard Mumford Jones, and many others. "A biography that promises to be as long and as fascinating as Boswell's Johnson," said the late Sir Herbert Read; and Edmund Wilson believes that it "will undoubtedly stand as a literary classic." The Treacherous Years bears out the validity of such praise. Here we see Henry James in the midst of his deep personal crisis of the 1890's, and watch as the tales and noels of this period provide his catharsis. His triumphant emergence from the depression by which he was afflicted after his unrequited love affair with the theater constitutes both a fascinating chapter in literary history and a unique case of literary self-therapy. The struggle to regain his emotional health, his relationships with several young men who became his acolytes, are described by James's biographer with insight and narrative skill. In writing this biography, Leon Edel does not dwell on the day-to-day habits of his subject; he focuses, rather, on what is truly characteristic of the creative personality—the emotional life, the exercise of the symbol-making imagination—through which the artist tells us personal parables about himself. "All the rest," says Dr. Edel, "is gossip and anecdotage." This volume concludes with James's return to spiritual health and the onset of his most prolific years, during which he sometimes wrote a story a week. View Less