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Notes
James had spent much of the previous spring in Florence, the setting of the story. In his ‘Collection of British Authors’, Tauchnitz had published volume one of the Macmillan edition of The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales as volume 1881 and volume two as volume 1888. See LeRoy Phillips, A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James, revised edition, 1930 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), pp. 16–17, and BHJ, p. 384.
New-York Daily Tribune, 25 December 1881, p. 8. The reviewer — John Hay, former secretary to Abraham Lincoln and a friend — summed up: ‘Of the importance of this volume there can be no question. It will certainly remain one of the notable books of the time. It is properly to be compared, not with the light and ephemeral literature of amusement, but with the gravest and most serious works of imagination which have been devoted to the study of the social conditions of the age and the moral aspects of our civilization’ (p. 8). For more on James and Hay, see George Monteiro, Henry James and John Hay: The Record of a Friendship (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press, 1965).
For James’s friendship with Stevenson, see Janet Adam Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948).
Mary Hartpence Sands (1853–96), American wife of Mahlon Sands and friend of James from 1883 until her death. Her husband’s sister Katherine had in 1884 married E. L. Godkin, founder of the Nation and a staunch friend of James’s. See Robert L. Gale, A Henry James Encyclopedia (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 586–87.
The ‘enclosed leaf’ is not included in LB, MA. Apparently James is sending copies of Daisy Miller: A Study. An International Episode. Four Meetings (2 vols, 1879) to Mme F. Pillon, for these tales appeared in her translation in Paris in 1886 (BHJ, p. 362). Mme Pillon was the wife of François Pillon, a French philosopher and friend of William James, who by translating some of James’s essays into French helped him become known in France. See Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1967), pp. 202–3, 252–3.
Gibson Craig, Half-Length Portraits (London: Sampson Low, 1876).
James translated Alphonse Daudet’s Port Tarascon: The Last Adventures of the Illustrious Tartarin for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, LXXXI (June–November 1890), 3–25 to 937–55. The book was published by Harper & Brothers in New York on 30 October 1890 (BHJ, 210, 337). For James’s comment on this work, see letter 199.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Moore, R.S. (1993). The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan 1877–1914. In: Moore, R.S. (eds) The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11594-5_1
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