Colin Burrow at the LRB:
In 1904 Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume. It didn’t include everything: ‘I want to quietly disown a few things by not thus supremely adopting them,’ as James put it. The ‘disowned’ works included some early gems such as The Europeans. The labour of ‘supremely adopting’ the stuff he still thought worthy was grinding. He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it doesn’t sell.’
James could never be accused of failing to mill experience to the very finest of its visible shards. For a novelist, at least for one with his delicacy of perception, that was a source of greatness.
more here.
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