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...

Leon Edel has come to be recognized as the prime authority on the life of Henry James. And at a time when James has been made the subject of so many appreciative but highly theoretical essays, we have been waiting on Mr. Edel to give us … an authentic and definitive biography. Now, with the first volume of this long-expected work ["Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870"], we can see that Mr. Edel has been aiming not only to get at all the facts, but to enter so deeply into th...

In Bloomsbury there are nine characters in search of an author. This Pirandello pirouette was turned by Leon Edel 15 or 20 years ago. Since then, the ratio has reversed to nine authors in search of any one Bloomsbury character, especially for such important dramatis personae as Professor Edel's: the economist John Maynard Keynes, the man of letters Leonard Woolf, the novelist Virginia Woolf, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the artist-critic Roger Fry, the ar...

With this fifth volume, perhaps somewhat too brashly and summarily entitled The Master, Leon Edel at long last brings to a close his biography of James which has been appearing serially since 1953. In its way it is a phenomenal production, if only because of the truly exhaustive research that has gone into it and because it is probably the longest biography in English, and for all I know in any other language, of any single writer—of a writer, moreover, of whom it cannot be said that he really ...

[Henry James, the] foremost American novelist, is entitled to rich and ample writing, and Mr. Edel has an encyclopedic knowledge of James. One may admire his patience, yet question the value of his thousand, incessant details [included in Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881 and Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895]. To list piece by piece the furniture in a Boston hotel room casually occupied, to note that in his London lodgings on Bolton Street James faced a sooty, brown, brick...

Leon Edel's masterly career in literary psychology, expressed in this superb collection ["The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology"], reveals the process by which the artist's private myth is transformed into a dream we all can share. "Art is the result," Edel writes, "not of calm and tranquillity, however much the artist may, on occasion, experience calm in the act of writing. It springs from tension and passion, from a state of dise...

Mr. Edel's biography of the young Henry James ["Henry James: The Untried Years"] is imposing…. The very notion of devoting so many pages to a period before James had produced a single important work is itself a measure of Mr. Edel's aspiration…. Zealously, but with intelligence and grace, he sets the record straight: he picks up all the "stitches" which James in his memoirs "dropped for worry-saving"—disposes of rash speculation as...

It is one thing to write a cradle-to-grave biography of a man of genius and to bring to the surface the psychological forces that seemed to form him, as Leon Edel did in his five-volume life of Henry James, a masterpiece of the biographer's art. It is quite another to evoke the interlocking lives of a group like "Bloomsbury," in which there are two geniuses and many talents—all individual, though united in their beliefs and tastes, and who die, variously, in youth, their middle y...

In the purely biographical sense, nothing could well exceed the care and the patience with which Mr. Edel has accumulated, over many years, the immense materials for his portrait [of Henry James], or, on the whole, the taste, the imaginativeness, the narrative sense with which he has disposed them. This work is not for a moment to be classified along with those flat-footed—and usually slow-paced—literary biographies which put the royalty statement and the railway timetable on the same level wi...

Mr. Edel [in "The Psychological Novel, 1900–1950"] is intent on examining the developments in fiction since the break that, according to Virginia Woolf, occurred in December, 1910, that break at which the novelists whom she called "materialists"—Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, etc.—fell back into the dark pit of the nineteenth century where they belonged, and the novelists whom she called "spiritualists"—Proust, Joyce, Eliot (significantly), ...