Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Henry James suggested the significance of letters overall and thus of his own letters through the importance he placed in critical essays and reviews on the letters of others, such as those of André Marie and Jean-Jacques Ampère, Balzac, Ximenes Doudan, Flaubert, Eugénie de Guérin, Gustave de Molinari, Henri Regnault, Sainte-Beuve, William Ellery Channing, Carlyle and Emerson, and Lord Byron, among others. One motive for paying close attention to letters, as James wrote in his preface to Rupert Brooke's Letters from America, was because:Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us as a poet, in spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course.(James 1984: 747)But letters and letter-writing were important not only in James's understanding of others. They were central in his own life, too. Not only did he write letters as a way to conduct his business as a professional writer, he wrote them to maintain relations with family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. The more than 10,400 extant letters supplement ... log in or subscribe to read full text