Shaping The Complete Letters of Henry James

I imagine that the realization of any large project depends on fortune, adapta tion and persistence. This is the story, at any rate, of The Complete Letters of Henry James, an edition that will contain some 10,500 letters, notes and telegrams. The Complete Letters began as an idea in 1993, found an institutional home in 1995, finished its first two volumes in 2004 and published them in 2006. Those two volumes introduced the edition’s editorial method: scholarly and critical, full annotation, and with the letters re - presented in plain-text as a way to offer a reliable and readable edition of the original letter texts and also to highlight James’s process of representation. Since 2006 the project brought out print volumes three, four and five. The sixth and seventh books are fully under way, two more are organized, and thousands of individual letters stand in various states of transcription and annotation. The Complete Letters of Henry James will finish with some 140 volumes, if its work plan holds up to the tests of time and budgets. The books are organized in groups of two or three, with each group covering a biographically relevant time period in James’s life. To support the edition, the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, has to date collected some 10,200 letter copies of James’s nearly 10,500 extant letters and continues to develop a reference library for the letters project. The library contains dozens of Henry James first editions, hundreds of monographs and reference books having to do with Henry James studies, copies of thousands of supporting documents such as the diaries of Theordora Bosanquet (who was one of James’s amanuenses), James’s own diaries, letters to Henry James, James family letters, and letters written by some of James’s friends and acquaintances, such as Edith Wharton and Isabel Stewart Gardner. The James Center purchased more than eleven thousand pages of letter transcriptions and planning notes made by Leon Edel for both his five-volume biography of Henry James and also his four-volume Henry James Letters edition. The Edel transcriptions include a number of letters lost or damaged since Edel saw them.