What kind of book about Henry James would you expect from a vivid and eager young radical, whose own interest in politics and history is prodigious, who has a keen appetite for almost every kind of life except the life lived in English country houses, and who detests, with all her many gifts of detestation, the predominance of sex in the relations of men and women? You would do well not to expect a delineative book, which defines Henry James with a portrait-painter's hand, or a luminously expository book, which makes him plainer to readers who could not understand for themselves.

[In "Henry James"] Miss West has given us neither of these things. One would have been astonished if she had, and yet not more astonished, I think, than one is by the book she has actually written, which with all its brilliant arrogance and cockiness, with all...