"The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. James' The Europeans gently satirizes both early nineteenth-century New England society and the sophisticated visiting Europeans who encounter it. While this wryly comic novel has had its critical champions - F. R. Leavis and Richard Poirier among them - it has not previously received the scholarly attention it deserves. This edition, based on the work's first book appearance in 1878, reconstructs the novel's literary, cultural and historical contexts, provides extensive annotation, and gives a detailed textual history of the work, drawing on newly available James letters. It will be of interest to James scholars, book historians and students of nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature and culture, and will also re-introduce readers to the pleasures of Henry James' early style"--

"The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (hereafter CFHJ) has been undertaken in the belief that there is a need for a full scholarly, informative, historical edition of his work, presenting the texts in carefully checked, accurate form, with detailed annotation and extensive introductions. James's texts exist in a number of forms, including manuscripts (though most are lost), serial texts, and volumes of various sorts, often incorporating significant amounts of revision, most conspicuously the so-called New York Edition (hereafter NYE) published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York and Macmillan & Co. in London (1907-9). Besides these there are also pirated editions, unfinished works published posthumously, and other questionable forms. The CFHJ takes account of these complexities, within the framework of a textual policy which aims to be clear, orderly and consistent"--