5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Revel in the brilliant cruelty of Henry James's criticism
Whatever else it may be, a piece of literary criticism is also always a confession — a surreptitious declaration of its author's hopes for her own work. What, then, was the novelist Henry James confessing in the hundreds of critical essays he wrote over the course of his 50-year career? What was he revealing about his own fiction when he deplored Charles Dickens as crude or chided Emile Zola for occasional tawdriness? Of the French novelist Guy de Maupassant, James wrote: 'He has arranged, as it were, the light in which he wishes to sit.' James, I think, has done the same, and there is no better occasion for assessing the tint of his preferred lighting than 'On Writers and Writing,' a new collection of his critical essays.
