Within the Rim: And Other Essays, 1914-15

Within the Rim is a slim volume of essays Henry James wrote in the last two years of his life, as the First World War was tearing apart the European civilization he had spent his career observing. James was old by then, in his early seventies, and the war affected him deeply. He had lived in England for decades but kept his American citizenship until 1915, when he changed it to British in part as a protest against the United States staying out of the conflict. The essays in this volume capture some of that grief and conviction.

The title piece, Within the Rim, was published in 1917 after James had died, and it describes his experience of looking out from the south coast of England and feeling the war just across the Channel. Other essays in the collection take up wartime causes James cared about. The American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. The Belgian refugees who had streamed into England after the German invasion. The reading rooms set up in hospitals for wounded soldiers. James writes about all of these with the long, careful sentences readers either love him for or struggle to follow.

For anyone interested in James’s nonfiction, or in the way the First World War affected the older generation of writers who had to watch their world end, this is a useful book. It is short, it is intimate in a way the late novels rarely allow, and it shows the famously elusive Master letting his political and moral feelings come closer to the surface than they ever did in fiction. The wartime essays are also a useful primary source for historians of British home front culture and Anglo American sentiment in the years before the United States finally entered the war.