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“... of the preparation for their publication before his death in 1972. The Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty scrappy so far as journal entries go, and it has to be said that the whole collection does Wilson no good whatsoever: which, considering his genuine ...”

“... had asked him, Straight simply said: ‘Well, he left, that’s all …’ I suggested he ask Leon Edel, since Edel had access to all the diaries and letters and would probably know the answer. This led inevitably to a much larger subject: had Edel deliberately suppressed ...”

“... perspectives powerfully applied to the family’s relations and texts, soon after his death, by Leon Edel in his multi-volume life of Henry James. As a Harvard professor, Matthiessen had been, under the terms laid down by the James estate, one of the very few permitted to use the huge family archive in the Houghton Library: in effect, as a ...”

“... later: ‘I feel as if you were one of the 2 or 3 sole intellectual & moral companions I have.’ Leon Edel, in his majestic biography of Henry James, stressed what he saw as a deep unconscious rivalry between the brothers, which pulled against their more consciously maintained fraternal affection. If there is a fault in that magisterial biography it is ...”

“... public and his more popular rivals, not his future biographers. But in the context of Leon Edel’s longstanding defence of the biographer’s art, his reading of the story as one in which ‘the creative imagination triumphs over the mundane’ and ‘the keeper of the shrine pays his tribute to art by being imaginative himself’ is ...”

“... Speculation, Leon Edel remarks in his one-volume life of Henry James, is ‘the stock-in-trade of all biographers’. But if all biographers speculate, some do so more scrupulously and convincingly than others. Edel, for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling ...”

“... to illegible ashes – ‘as a kind of sadism on posterity’, in the words of his biographer Leon Edel. James was fully alert to the power of letters, having paid close attention to the published correspondence of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend ...”

“... essays on Tennyson’s plays and on Ibsen. Then I unravelled the phrase (offered by the editor, Leon Edel): ‘the complete literary-critical non-fictional writings of the novelist’. Meaning, it seems, not the writing on drama, art or travel, and not the literary criticism contained or enacted in the stories. It is in ‘Greville Fane’, for ...”

“... as possible, and having plenty of distractions. This brings us to a major issue in regard to Leon Edel’s great edition, now concluded, of the Letters. It could be argued that to be as un-‘Freudian’ as James makes you an ideal subject for Freudian study. This does not seem quite to be Edel’s ...”

“... not offered her one; and her mother’s example was inappropriate: she wasn’t like her mother. Leon Edel, in his Life of Henry James, sees Alice as a casualty not so much of the family as of the age: ‘In our time,’ he says, ‘she might have learned to play tennis, to swim, to row, to ski, to drive a car.’ It’s hard to think of Henry in any ...”

“... when its sexual content is muted, can be linked to a broader tradition of psychological fiction. Leon Edel wrote years ago of ‘the vampire theme’ in the fiction of Henry James; and Keats’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate wrote (with some scepticism) about the possibility that ‘Lamia’ represented Keats’s transformation of Fanny Brawne into the ...”

“... are letters but talk?’ James wrote in 1882, in a letter printed by Lubbock but not included by Edel) and in the constant play of discrimination which points the talk and makes it ‘good’, that one can see how much James viewed his world through the eyes of his family and their New England acquaintance. It was their Idealism which enabled him to wrest ...”

“... determined not to make the same mistakes as Henry James, whom he knew and disliked. (According to Leon Edel, he was fond of ‘telling his friends of an alleged attempt by Hugh Walpole to violate the Master, and of James’s passionate recoil’.) Maugham was present on the opening night of Guy Domville in 1895 and seems not to have sympathised when his ...”

“... may lurk beneath, as a speculative and analytical biographer such as Henry James’s apostle, Leon Edel, has never hesitated to do. Although Kaplan speaks of the ‘risks’ that Carlyle believed a biographer should accept, he himself is cautious enough. He devotes his pages almost entirely to the outward events, chiefly domestic, of what he rightly ...”

“... The Sixties, the last in a series of his notebooks, most of them, though not this one, edited by Leon Edel. As with all of Wilson’s prose I was easily borne along by the intermittent and casual elegance of his expression. But that there is so little of real substance in the book, and so much nasty gossip, idle observation, inconsequential nattering ...”