What kind of book about Henry James would you expect from a vivid and eager young radical, whose own interest in politics and history is prodigious, who has a keen appetite for almost every kind of life except the life lived in English country houses, and who detests, with all her many gifts of detestation, the predominance of sex in the relations of men and women? You would do well not to expect a delineative book, which defines Henry James with a portrait-painter's hand, or a luminously expository book, which makes him plainer to readers who could not understand for themselves.

[In "Henry James"] Miss West has given us neither of these things. One would have been astonished if she had, and yet not more astonished, I think, than one is by the book she has actually written, which with all its brilliant arrogance and cockiness, with all its impatience at the difference between yesterday's mode and to-day's, with all its failures in sympathy and in understanding—there is an amazingly unperceiving passage about "The Awkward Age"—does glow with such a beauty of admiration for Henry James that one gets the strongest incentive to read him all over again….

Miss West's book has wit and beauty and intelligence and stupidity. It has hardly more than a scrap of anything you could call insight. You would never learn from it that Henry James's life was among other things a long discarding of naïveté. You would never learn from it that his books were a series of attempts to put his newer ideas of distinction and its opposite into the place once occupied by his earliest ideas of right and wrong. Some day Miss West will find her real subject. But, being only twenty-four, she need not hurry. (p. 3)