Leon Edel has come to be recognized as the prime authority on the life of Henry James. And at a time when James has been made the subject of so many appreciative but highly theoretical essays, we have been waiting on Mr. Edel to give us … an authentic and definitive biography. Now, with the first volume of this long-expected work ["Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870"], we can see that Mr. Edel has been aiming not only to get at all the facts, but to enter so deeply into the spirit of his subject that his book would have the ease and naturalness and shape of a work of art. And in this he has succeeded—brilliantly and movingly. One can criticise him for being almost too sympathetic with Henry, and he does tend to see the other Jameses entirely too much through Henry's eyes. But a few criticisms aside, the book is important and beautiful….

When Mr. Edel began his patient and exhaustive labors more than twenty years ago, there was still some question whether James belonged to American literature. And despite the current fashion in his favor, much of what is written about him suggests an alchemist inhumanly mixing great novels together only for the sake of "form," rather than the touching, limited, and insatiable writer who is so American in his travels, his international scene, his too clear-cut morality. James brings home to us the amazing personal vision that is the lonely strength of American literature. Perhaps it is because we have never really seen James in his own time and place—in all those native places of the heart he occupied wherever he lived—that we have never really had a biography until now….

Mr. Edel has understood that with so peculiarly sensitive a novelist for his subject, it was essential to "melt down" his materials into an organic narrative that would not only record, but directly portray, Henry moving, reading, dreaming, and at last beginning to write.

What Mr. Edel has done is to give us that long-buried world of James's childhood and youth…. He has restored to us the extremely vulnerable, shy, and ambitious person James was, while constantly confronting the young James with the retrospective, voracious, and still secretly troubled artist he was to become. Though there is to be another volume to this biography and possibly a third, at every point in the recital we already see James complete. The book has been composed as a series of vignettes or tiny snapshots, moment after moment recovered with enormous labor out of the dead past…. It is Mr. Edel's deep cherishing of every scene and his loving immersion in the data, this constant evocation of the passive and always withdrawn Henry …, that give such a sense of happy abundance, of ease and pace, in the writing of the book. Yet it is all done without the slightest concession to impressionism, we are always rooted in the fact, in document and letter, in novel and memoir and ledger. And while the documentation is visible, in order to correct the usual accounts of the James family that merely repeat each other, it never fusses or interrupts the narrative. (p. 1)

Because Mr. Edel sees the Jameses with so special and almost automatic a sympathy for Henry, one may object that he is less than fair to the elder James; he shows us the foolish father, but not the thinker. And he is entirely too blunt on William, who is presented always in the same light. Whatever William's early victories over Henry in the family circle. William has certainly lost the greater battle in the eyes of this generation, for whom William's philosophic ideals, with all their forced optimism, have come to seem less than Henry's slower, subtler, infinitely more cautious, but perhaps not that much more profound vision of life.

It seems to be a necessity for students of the Jameses, as it was in the family itself, to pick sides. Much of what has been written in offhand glances at Henry by admirers of William's philosophy is vulgar rubbish. But Mr. Edel, in his own sensitive and distinguished way, lets us down a little, too, for his interpretation of the James family strife is far too psychological and à la mode. The Jameses were a family of minds—and it is their minds that alienate people, whether they are brothers or not. Properly speaking, Henry had no ideas, only observations…. We can never forget that Henry was different, to begin with—he lived by impressions. One wishes Mr. Edel had told us more about the kind of mind that does live this way; it seems to be more and more the modern literary mind which can be very powerful, but is always a little too partial and fanatical and in quest of salvation.

But perhaps Mr. Edel will get around to these matters in his next volume, where he will take up the mature novelist. And in any event, it is this close loving awareness of Henry that has made this fine book possible, and that rounds it out so well. (p. 13)