This digital edition of The Complete Letters of Henry James will open a new door for scholars and general readers alike to the full archive of the correspondence of one of the most prolific and influential writers of the modern era. Launching out from the critically acclaimed print series (now being published by University of Nebraska Press, 4 volumes to date), the open-access digital edition will allow readers to experience and appreciate James’s letters in new ways and in new dimensions, as it moves beyond the inherent limitations of the bound volumes. Even though James has long been recognized as one of the great letter-writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until now only a fraction of his correspondence has been published: roughly 3,100 letters out of the more than 10,500 known to survive, and these scattered among dozens of out-of-print volumes. Not surprisingly, given James’s long residence abroad, his manuscripts are dispersed at repositories throughout the United States and Europe. The digital edition will for the first time allow readers to access all these documents in a searchable (and sustainable) format. The edition will reinvent not just Henry James but also the prospects for scholarship in Anglo-American literary culture of the modern era. Working from the authoritative and meticulously edited texts of the print series—each volume of which has received the imprimatur of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions—the digital platform for accessing the letters will greatly expand and enhance the contextual range of those documents, giving the reader access to materials that (in print) can only be suggested by way of a bibliographical citation or elliptical cross-reference. When James responds to a review of one of his novels, for example, instead of giving the reader the bare information about where the review appeared, the digital edition will empower the reader to access the full content of the review, thereby embedding both texts in a denser cultural field. The on-line platform will also empower the reader to engage the letters through a window of reciprocal scholarship, an advantage from which the annotation of the letters especially will benefit, restoring to the documents an invaluable element of social practice that the print edition inevitably silences. In the Nebraska Edition, limitations of space (and editorial constraint) have tended to muffle the distinctively literary qualities of imagination at work in the correspondence—even though (as one reviewer has commented) the letters “are brilliantly and wittily alive” with literary allusions to a wide range of prose and poetry in English (and, occasionally, French, Italian, and Latin). Other more contemporaneous allusions—social and political—overlooked in the print edition, might also be glossed, further extending the range of any given document’s potential signification. The online platform for the letters will invite the reader to flesh out these possibilities and thereby expand the referential field, making audible a dimension of the interpersonal meaning of the correspondence that the print edition cannot reproduce.

Michael Anesko, The Pennsylvania State University