In the purely biographical sense, nothing could well exceed the care and the patience with which Mr. Edel has accumulated, over many years, the immense materials for his portrait [of Henry James], or, on the whole, the taste, the imaginativeness, the narrative sense with which he has disposed them. This work is not for a moment to be classified along with those flat-footed—and usually slow-paced—literary biographies which put the royalty statement and the railway timetable on the same level with the genuinely revealing and illuminative…. [Heavy as the] burden of documentation is, Mr. Edel never, or very seldom, bends under it. His own literary skills—his feeling for story, his sense of type, and the like—are almost always adequate to the task of composition and the sustaining of interest. He has, moreover, a conception of his sitter that is both sensitive and well-defined, and is by no means merely the inherited one.

He has, as a good biographer should have, some of the talents of an archaeologist and a paleontologist, and in one case he has excavated, and pieced together out of shattered and scattered fragments, the evidence of a long, close and vital intimacy in James's life that has not hitherto been suspected—his friendship with the slightly older American woman novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson….

In general, does a biographical work so vast as this justify itself, not only by its intrinsic interest, but by the enhanced and deepened understanding it may make possible of a writer's independent oeuvre?…

[Mr. Edel] is convinced that biographical knowledge has a constant and direct value to the literary critic, and his principal concern with James's fiction, in these volumes [Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881 and Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895], is to discover the traces in it of James's own experiences and even his own personality. Theoretically this is a valid enough procedure in a work that is primarily biographical, but I think that Mr. Edel is sometimes betrayed, by his eagerness to come upon such parallels, into the discovery of connections that are very doubtful indeed. (p. 310)

[Sometimes he makes] fanciful and not at all helpful associations of fact and fiction. On the other hand, Mr. Edel frequently suggests connections that are perfectly plausible….

The deeper interest of this biography, however, does not lie in these direct and explicit relationships between life and art, but in the refined and enriched awareness it makes possible of the whole many-sided context—personal, familial, social, historical—out of which the imaginative world of James's fiction slowly and fully emerged. In his feeling for that context, except perhaps for its New England aspects, Mr. Edel is almost always perspicacious. He has a great story to tell, and it is a measure of his success that he rarely falls short of its exacting demands. (p. 311)