“... everyone else up. The apparent rivalry between William and Henry has been skilfully portrayed by Leon Edel. After each encounter, they would go their separate ways complaining of headaches and other ills. For the psychoanalytically-inclined, their surface fraternity masks a deep ambivalence – some have said with homosexual overtones. Its climax is ...”

“... are traceable until after the New Year, and it is tempting to surmise that none were written.’ Leon Edel has said that ‘a modern biographer ... is primarily a storyteller,’ and the common aspiration of biographers towards the authority of the novelist can irritate those who want to know why ‘X must have felt a or b.’ Ann Schlee takes the ...”

“... but acknowledges, with a little humour of his own, that ‘the great reformers never have it.’ Leon Edel, the editor of the letters, suggests James ‘is being coy about the entire subject’, but he seems rather to be busy saying several things at once. ‘Outpourings’, ‘exhibition’ and ‘capital sport’ allow for a normative sense of ...”

“... Kaplan meets the challenge of Vidal’s cagey wit by bearing down even harder, giving him the full Leon Edel-Matthew Bruccoli filing-cabinet treatment. For years Vidal has made fun of ‘scholar-squirrels’ – myopic trivia buffs who comb the lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald hoping to find the one itty-bitty piece of factual lint no one else has ...”

“... than we do about Dickens or Henry James. My father tells an anecdote about James’s biographer Leon Edel: when asked what James would have been doing at this hour on this date in 1895, Edel stroked his chin and constructed an answer. The digital footprints that we now generate daily will give the biographers of the ...”

“... unintellectual’; but they might just as well have been the choice of Howdie, who as Leon Edel remarked was ‘not at all intellectual’ himself. Sturgis had an exceptionally good cook, and the dyspeptic Henry James complained of a sense of ‘repleteness before (even) dinner’. Still, he clearly enjoyed the Qu’Acre atmosphere of gossipy ...”

“... own efforts to determine his posthumous reputation but quickly locks focus on the biographer Leon Edel’s alliance with James’s nephew Harry, which allowed Edel to gain control of the James papers. The second half of the book is an entertaining takedown of the unscrupulous ...”

“... 1891, staying at the Marine Hotel in Kingstown in Ireland, James, described by his biographer Leon Edel as someone ‘in search of, in flight from, something or other’, had the idea for his story ‘The Private Life’, in which the sociable writer in the drawing-room could at the same moment be found alone with his other self in his ...”

“... Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to end his volume – to bring down the curtain, so to speak – on the letter in which James describes his awful humiliation at the booing of Guy Domville, himself bowing on stage with a rigid politeness. And one death among the many that darken the ...”

“... was in fact the very life that James chose to live, or was forced to live. ‘In all his work,’ Leon Edel wrote, ‘there is no tale written with greater investment of personal emotion.’ In ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, James’s solitary existence is shown in its most frightening manifestation: a life of pure coldness. The story includes the ...”

“... Park. ‘Instead of superficial contacts with the British upper classes,’ James’s biographer Leon Edel reports, ‘James began to form friendships of a more significant kind – with members of his own class, the writers and artists of London.’ There was something in the air of the early 1880s and he began to allow it to enter his mind, an air ...”

“... challenge for an editor. Far from constituting a complete edition, as is sometimes imagined, Leon Edel’s four volumes of Henry James Letters (1974-84) in fact contain fewer than a tenth of the letters thought to survive. (Horne puts the likely range at 12,000 to 15,000, with some estimates of the total actually written as high as 40,000.) The ...”

“... and James’s own fiction, because he had never ‘got over his below-stairs origins’. Such is Leon Edel’s phrase as he addresses himself, in his biography of James, to the vicious if often witty extravaganza of Boon. And Edel sees the entire issue as concretised in a single word: ‘James had called Wells ...”

“... read these days, and she figures primarily as a character in someone else’s story. Ever since Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, in which she appears as a lonely spinster with an ear trumpet and an unrequited passion for her fellow novelist, speculation over the closeness of her friendship with James and the motives for her suicide has dominated ...”

“... there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William ...”