By Christopher Beha
A few weeks ago, I finished reading the Library of America’s six-volume, sixty-eight-hundred-page edition of the novels of Henry James. I’m a sucker for completist projects, but this one came about more or less by accident. It took me a couple of years, and I didn’t undertake it in an especially devoted or systematic way. I had always considered James one of my favorite writers, largely on the basis of a few long novels (“The Portrait of a Lady,” “The Ambassadors”) and short stories (“The Aspern Papers,” “The Figure in the Carpet”). But I knew him less well than any other figure in my personal canon. Once you’ve gotten beyond the bright constellation of the major works, it can be hard to know where to go with James’s writing; there’s so much of it, and no one seems to agree on what’s what. James himself tried to address the problem late in life, with the revised “New York Edition” of his writing. But this only complicated matters, because he left out some of his best work, including “Washington Square.”
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