Friday, October 22, 1999

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 BOOKMARK: "He was very much aware of the dictates of the marketplace," a scholar says of Henry James. "He was a professional writer in every sense of the word." 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, 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 One is an index of letters that includes 7,460 documents that are unpublished and thus new to most scholars.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. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article