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Aesthetics, Fiction, and Henry James Jr.


A new collection of the writings of Henry James Jr. on fiction as an art, published by NYRB Classics, has drawn my attention.  A reviewer of the collection quotes HJ saying, "The old superstition about fiction being 'wicked' has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed towards any story which does not more or less admit it is only a joke.” 

Some of James’s eminent contemporaries were casualties of the notion that fiction was a moral embarrassment — that its very falsity amounted to a sort of nefarious deception. In the novels of Anthony Trollope, for instance, James detected “a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe." 

Becca Rothfeld, reviewing this collection for WaPo, wonders whether we are to take this as a banner James was raising on behalf of his own work.  Come into my tent, he would be saying and get fiction that is not apologetic about being fiction, and is not a joke, either.

As a sometime reader of HJ Jr., I'm not sure I can endorse that as a way of reading his fiction. 


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  1. HenryFebruary 27, 2026 at 6:59 AM

    Then how would you read his fiction? What is the alternative besides reminding readers that it is only make-believe and being unapologetic about its being fiction?

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