Views and Reviews

Views and Reviews is a posthumous collection of Henry James’s early literary criticism, gathered by Le Roy Phillips and published in 1908. The pieces collected here were originally written for various American magazines in the late 1860s and the 1870s, mostly for the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly, during the years when James was making his living as a working reviewer before his novels began to support him.

The essays cover a wide range of writers James was reading and judging in his twenties and early thirties. There are pieces on George Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Hawthorne, Whitman, Swinburne, and other major figures of the period. The voice is recognisably James from the start, with the careful balanced judgements and the willingness to take a writer seriously without going easy on the weaknesses. The Whitman essay is one of the more famous pieces in the collection, a sharp early dismissal of Leaves of Grass that James largely came to regret in later life. The Trollope and George Eliot essays are more sympathetic and show James working out the ideas about the novel that would later appear in The Art of Fiction.

What makes the collection valuable is the chance to see how James thought about his own craft in the years before he had fully developed his mature style. The criticism is direct and confident in a way that the late James prose generally is not. He says what he thinks. He compares writers against each other. He makes specific complaints about specific scenes. The young James was a sharper critic than the late James, partly because the late James was too aware of the difficulty of doing well in fiction to attack other novelists with much energy.

The book runs about three hundred pages and works best read in essay sized pieces. For readers interested in James as a literary critic or in the American magazine criticism of the post Civil War decades, this is essential material. It pairs naturally with the later collections French Poets and Novelists and Partial Portraits.