Wood & Henry James (critic)

[alice wellintown]

Henry James was foul about Far from the Madding Crowd when it appeared
in 1874. He was a young writer, ambitious, seething, silkily
aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be
deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry
peasants, would not do. In the Nation, James complained that the novel
had a ‘fatal lack of magic’, and was written in a ‘verbose and
redundant style … Everything human in the book strikes us as factious
and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the
dogs.’

Perfuming the Money Issue
James Wood
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American
Masterpiece by Michael Gorra

to read the rest, go to London Review of Books