James’s 1888 collection gathers his portraits of writers he knew or admired: Emerson, George Eliot and her Daniel Deronda (as a dialogue), Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev and George du Maurier. It ends with The Art of Fiction, his famous plea that the novel be free to attempt anything.
The essay that set the terms for modern talk about the novel, with a gallery of Victorian contemporaries beside it. Download the free EPUB.