[Henry James, the] foremost American novelist, is entitled to rich and ample writing, and Mr. Edel has an encyclopedic knowledge of James. One may admire his patience, yet question the value of his thousand, incessant details [included in Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881 and Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895]. To list piece by piece the furniture in a Boston hotel room casually occupied, to note that in his London lodgings on Bolton Street James faced a sooty, brown, brick wall, to dilate for a paragraph on the delicate dilemma of entertaining Maupassant at dinner when the clubs were closed … these trivia, though "true" enough, clog narrative. Biography is, after all, narrative or it is nothing. Devoted Jacobins will hail with reverence this loving specificity. But the burden on Mr. Edel leads to such writing as:

One morning in early December of 1884 the author of The Art of Fiction might have been seen standing in the damp and cold outside a dark and gloomy building with towers, on the edge of the Thames, well-known to Victorians as Millbank Prison.

This is out of G.P.R. James, in whose novels solitary horsemen might have been seen wending their ways through dark and gloomy landscapes. I suppose sheer weariness drives Mr. Edel from time to time into the historical present ("It is April. Paris throbs with the life of the season. Henry has met a young Russian, etc."). This is near bathos. Fortunately Mr. Edel recovers from these moments of fatigue.

Mr. Edel is an intelligent admirer, not a blind devotee. His discussions of James' art are forthright, sympathetic, just, and candid. Thus he says of The Europeans that its characters are puppets and that James had not tried very hard. On the other hand his perceptive analysis of The Portrait of a Lady is affirmative and admirable….

Critical comment on the shorter fictions have the same judicial quality. Moreover, Mr. Edel, though making us aware of the important autobiographical elements hidden in James' fiction, never deviates into uncritical Freudianism nor does he employ the facile myth and metaphor "explanation" of literary art too common among his contemporaries.

But his volumes are biography, in which criticism, though necessary, is secondary to the central aim; and Mr. Edel's importance, his permanent worth lie in what he tells us about James. He tells us, needless to say, more than anybody else has done…. (p. 30)

Mr. Edel's biography, when complete, will be one of the monumental biographies of the century. It has weight, amplitude, subtlety and knowledge. Its great qualities of patience and understanding carry with them, of course, inevitable limitations. The scene is oddly limited to "literature," travel, society, and personal relations. One could scarcely learn from these crowded pages that there were a Franco-Prussian war, a Congress of Berlin, a Vatican Council, a Gilded Age, a bombardment of Alexandria, riots in Trafalgar Square, a Turko-Russian war, Fabianism, the Parnell divorce and the Dreyfus case in this quarter-century. Since James paid no attention to these matters, Mr. Edel, properly enough, pays no attention to them as a biographer. When, however, one thinks of Balzac with his enormous understanding of all France, or of Zola with his vast canvas of the Second Empire, or of Trollope with his wide comprehension of English finance, politics, the church, and the governing groups, or of Ibsen, or of The Brothers Karamazov, published a year before The Portrait of a Lady, one realizes the necessity, not of complaining that James did not do something else, but of defining him more sharply against the totality of the culture of the Atlantic community. Mr. Edel does not attempt this comparison—with all he has to say, how can he?—but his remarkable study seems to me to underline the need for such a comparative view if we are to understand more clearly the achievement of Henry James. (p. 32)