Leon Edel enjoys the reputation of being the foremost literary biographer of his time. That reputation began in 1953 with the publication of Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843-1870, the opening volume of the biography for which he is still probably...

The last of Leon Edel's five volumes, "Henry James, The Master: 1901–1916," has appeared, and those who have, since the publication of the first volume in 1953, enjoyed his skilfully managed unfolding of the novelist's career may simply be assured that the climaxes of this period [are] … all properly scaled to give them their accustomed pleasures, in a prose tone which has a perceptibly, though not disproportionately, greater touch of magniloquence than that of earl...

The exact sensuous feel of things was something, on occasion, [Henry James] expressed a clear desire and even a preference for:

He wanted the hour of the day at which this and that had happened, and the temperature and the weather and the sound, and yet more the stillness, from the street, and the exact lookout, with the corresponding look-in, through the window and the slant on the walls of the light of afternoons that had been….

"If we pierce any artist's legend", Edel claims [in his latest book, Stuff of Sleep and Dreams], "we discover an all-too-troubled human." Piercing the artist, and the "human" behind the artist, he discovers an all-too-troubled legend. The legend is called "literary psychology".

Literary psychology seeks the emotions and the persona within the work as distinct from the person of the artist. It is an attempt to study the metamorphoses...