"Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship.

Abstract

Of all legends of Master, perhaps most enduring is one that James himself deliberately cultivated--a portrait of artist in an ivory tower, writing in isolation from coarse demands of literary marketplace. In this provocative new book, Michael Anesko argues that we have uncritically accepted James's idealized and melodramatic vision for too long. Abundant evidence exists, Anesko contends, to prove that through literary marketplace James maintained an active, if ambivalent, link to the world and that his finished works were shaped not only by his imagination, but as he once had occasion to remark, by a constant and lively friction with market. Anesko draws upon previously unexamined evidence--publisher's records, correspondence between James and his editors, and documents detailing novelist's literary income--to reveal new ties between often harsh economic realities and inner workings of James's grasping imagination.

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