A Most Unholy Trade," Being Letters on the Drama

In these four intimate letters to publisher William Heinemann, Henry James holds forth on the theatre with characteristic ferocity and subtlety. Written in the late 1890s, they find the master of psychological fiction grappling with Henrik Ibsen's "Little Eyolf" , a play about a crippled child, a fracturing marriage, and the unbearable weight of human responsibility. James, who had himself attempted to conquer the stage and found it wanting, approaches the drama with the eye of a novelist who understands that the theatre demands a different kind of truth. These are not casual reviews but sustained, searching reflections on what drama can and cannot accomplish, and on the peculiar anguish of making art that must live in performance. The title itself , "A Most Unholy Trade" , carries both jest and genuine anguish, capturing James's lifelong ambivalence toward an art form he could never quite abandon. For readers who cherish James's prefaces, his notebooks, and his endless self-scrutiny, these letters offer the same pleasures in miniature: the precision, the qualification, the sense of a mind testing ideas against itself.