Diary: Jean McGarry considers a new edition of Henry James

As a beginner, I took it as axiomatic that a writer could only get better over time; and I judged my work-in-progress, whatever it was, as the acid test of capability. Now, after reading many novelists in full, all and every one of their books, I see that it’s far more likely that a writer arrives at the perfect meshing of subject and style—probably not first time out, but neither as a last shot. There is no straight line of better and ever better. The divine Proust wrote the first and last volumes of In Search of Lost Time before the start of World War I. During that war and just after he filled in the middle by adding four more volumes, so the last work completed might well lie not in volume six, Time Regained, but in tedious longueurs tracking the capture and release of the elusive lover Albertine.

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Henry James’s oeuvre, stories, novels, essays, travel writing, and reviews, newly released in thirty-four densely annotated volumes by Cambridge University Press, shows an interesting arc-like pattern, especially where the drawing of character is concerned. Consider snatches from three periods, early to middle James.