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Details
JAMES, Henry. The Private Life. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1893.
8o. Original blue gilt-decorated and -lettered cloth (some light soiling, spine a bit cocked). Provenance: Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), critic and writer (presentation inscription); R.W. Chapman (inscription dated 1912 on front free endpaper, bookplate).
FIRST EDITION. A FINE LITERARY ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY JAMES TO LESLIE STEPHEN on the half-title: "Leslie Stephen from Henry James."
Leslie Stephen was an eminent Victorian editor and critic, and the father of Virginia Woolf. Stephen and James met in the late 1860s. At that time, Stephen had not yet assumed the editorship of the literary review Cornhill nor had he published any of his classic essays. When James first arrived overseas, Stephen acted as something of a father figure, and upon his assumption of the editorship of Cornhill in 1871, he introduced James to a broad circle of readers. James became something of a regular fixture in the Stephen household, much to the chagrin of Virginia Woolf. In 1915 she wrote to Lytton Strachey that all she found in James's writing was "faintly tinged rosewater, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, as pale as Walter Lamb." Stephen was perhaps most famous for editing the Dictionary of National Biography. Edel & Laurence A39a; BAL 10602.
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FIRST EDITION. A FINE LITERARY ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY JAMES TO LESLIE STEPHEN on the half-title: "Leslie Stephen from Henry James."
Leslie Stephen was an eminent Victorian editor and critic, and the father of Virginia Woolf. Stephen and James met in the late 1860s. At that time, Stephen had not yet assumed the editorship of the literary review Cornhill nor had he published any of his classic essays. When James first arrived overseas, Stephen acted as something of a father figure, and upon his assumption of the editorship of Cornhill in 1871, he introduced James to a broad circle of readers. James became something of a regular fixture in the Stephen household, much to the chagrin of Virginia Woolf. In 1915 she wrote to Lytton Strachey that all she found in James's writing was "faintly tinged rosewater, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, as pale as Walter Lamb." Stephen was perhaps most famous for editing the Dictionary of National Biography. Edel & Laurence A39a; BAL 10602.