A Doubtful Henry James Letter

Abstract

REPORTING on a sale of autograph letters in 1909, the New York Times of 16 May focused on several documents, including what it calls ‘a characteristic letter of Henry James, the novelist’.1 Auctioned at Anderson’s2 for ‘a high price’, the James letter is ‘especially interesting’, comments the Times, as indicated by an excerpt: ‘It must be that I am losing in my old age the art I once excelled in, of keeping off readers. None of my books have had more than two or three readers, and these most women, who, poor things, you know, have never been able, from Eve down, to judge righteous judgment. But now, evidently from your proof, my horizon is widening.’ Whatever ‘humor’ there is in this excerpt, it is hardly of the sort to which the famous novelist’s readers were accustomed to find in his writings or his correspondents in the letters he wrote.