Henry James

In Henry James, The Untried Years, published in 1953, Leon Edel showed the formation of the novelist's personality and character. Now, in the second of his four-volume biography, he reveals the mature man in the process of fashioning his career. Those familiar with the James of legend will discover a wholly new figure in The Conquest of London: that of an ardent and often exuberant artist, systematically wooing fame and fortune, with an extraordinary sense of his destiny, and a hardiness of spirit lost to those who have known only the elderly and orotund James of Rye and Chelsea.

As in his first volume, Professor Edel focuses upon significant detail: refusing to be "engulfed" by his materials (he has now read some 12,000 James letters), he tells of James's nostalgic season in Cambridge, after his "passionate pilgrimage"; how he made his way abroad, studied life in Rome, returned to "try" New York and finally expatriated himself. Professor Edel's account of James's year in Paris shows him in the entourage of Turgenev and Flaubert; and then he pictures James' descent upon, and conquest of London among the eminent Victorians. The biography is filled with many vignettes of James's contemporaries, and this volume for the first time discloses a significant "attachment" in the novelist's life. "As revealing as anything yet written about this great man," said Harold Nicolson of The Untried Years. In The Conquest of London Professor Edel continues his revelations in what may well come to be the most significant literary biography of our time.