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Subject: it-fyi: On-Line Calendar of Henry James's Letters (Chron of Highe
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 10:31:27 -0500
On-Line Calendar of Henry James's Letters Tells Scholars Where to Find Them
By BIANCA P. FLOYD
A Web site created by the University of Nebraska Press now offers scholars
information about more than 10,500 letters written by the American novelist
Henry James.
The site, A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James & A Biographical Register
of Henry James's Correspondents (http://jamescalendar.unl.edu), brings
together two continuing projects. One is an index of letters that includes
7,460 documents that are unpublished and thus new to most scholars. The
index was compiled by Steven H. Jobe, a professor at Hanover College. The
other project is a biographical register of more than 1,000 of James's
correspondents compiled by Susan E. Gunter, a professor at Westminster
College of Salt Lake City.
"Henry James was a writer whose literary career spanned the last quarter of
the 19th century -- almost until the outbreak of the First World War," says
Mr. Jobe. "He was an expatriate American living in England, and he had a
singular grasp of English, American, and Continental intellectual and
literary culture of the time."
James wrote countless essays and reviews, 20 novels, and as many as 100
tales. "James's letters themselves constitute a literary creativity that
belongs aside his novels, not only for what they reveal about him, but also
for what they reveal about everyone he was in contact with," says Mr. Jobe.
The letters -- to his literary agent, his publishers, fellow writers, actors
and actresses, family members, and other friends and associates around the
world -- include a fair amount of gossip, literary and otherwise. But
frequently they also contain discussions of literary form and aesthetics,
particularly concerning the novel, Mr. Jobe says.
The on-line project was inspired by a number of factors, he says. The
letters are dispersed among more than 130 repositories and private
collections -- from one letter in the Keats-Shelley Museum, in Rome, to
thousands in the single largest collection of James letters, at the Houghton
Library at Harvard University.
The on-line index enables scholars to search the data base by date,
correspondent, repository, or keyword. The data base includes such
information as the date and place of a letter's composition, the name and
identity of the correspondent, the repository in which the letter is held,
and the physical condition of the original letter.
Mr. Jobe says new research based on the letters has helped correct
misconceptions about the author's life -- such as the view that he scorned
the marketplace and turned his back on his audience for the sake of his art.
"He was very much aware of the dictates of the marketplace. He was a
professional writer in every sense of the word."
"It is also a myth that James enjoyed a leisurely existence by way of
inherited wealth," says Mr. Jobe. "The truth of the matter is that his
writing was a profession and not an avocation, not something he indulged
in."
The Nebraska Press plans to issue the calendar and register in print form at
some future date, says Mr. Jobe, but only after there is general agreement
that all letters likely to be found have been included, and only after as
many correspondents as possible have been identified.
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education