Reviews
Lucidly, generously and entrancingly, Prof. Simon tells the story of a century and a half of dizzying struggles among Henry James himself and his critics to construct and demolish rival images of the Master. The tales she tells make a history in miniature of the wars over American identity -- national, intellectual and sexual. The historical Henry James emerges mysteriously smiling from the conflicting accounts, like a character in one of his own novels. Bravo! -- Sheldon M. Novick, Adjunct Professor of Law and History, Vermont Law School, author of Henry James: The Mature Master

Simon's book ... is unique, for it is the only work that gives an overview of all of James criticism .... It is also completely up to date. It enables readers to "get a handle" on the huge corpus that is James criticism.... Understanding the various paths that work on James has followed over the years, perceiving where these paths have branched off in different directions, identifying those that have not been followed through to their ultimate conclusions -- these are the most difficult aspects of doing scholarly work on an author about whom so much has been written. Thanks to Simon's book, James scholars and students will be able to see clearly where the uncharted territory lies, and as a result, it represents a significant and lasting contribution. -- Pierre A. Walker, Salem State College

[This is] an important work, offering a wide-ranging overview of personal, belletristic, academic, and cultural interest in James and providing students of the novelist with many different starting points for their own further studies. Simon also adds a fascinating story -- worthy of James's fictions themselves, or of the maliciously funny anecdotes in his sister Alice's Diary -- about scholarly egos, possessiveness, and the uses of institutional power to control who gets to write about James and what they may say. Even critics familiar with the tradition of James scholarship will be interested in the story of how it deve