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Facilitating Cultural Production and Enhancing Public Understanding through the Works of Henry James

Professor Philip Horne’s editorial and critical work on Henry James has shaped contemporary engagement with this major figure of 19th and early 20th century literature.

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28 April 2022

Professor Philip Horne is a leading expert on Henry James, and the founding General Editor of the Complete Fiction of Henry James for Cambridge University Press. Professor Horne’s research on James’ Notebooks uncovered a productive series of over 60 unused story ideas and fragments, eleven of which are the basis for the short stories written for Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Never Wrote. This collection was conceived and edited by Professor Horne, and includes stories by Susie Boyt; Amit Chaudhuri; Jonathan Coe; Giles Foden; Tessa Hadley; Joseph O’Neill; Colm Tóibin; Rose Tremain; Lynne Truss, and Paul Theroux. The book has sold over 1300 English-language copies. A Chinese translation came out in 2019 and had sold 1565 copies by the end of 2020. 

Professor Horne began the Henry James Reading Group in 2014, which led to this collection, and which has met 90 times from 2014-2021 (and has continued online through the Covid-19 pandemic). The group has approximately 100 members and includes authors Hadley and Boyt, alongside journalists, lawyers and senior public servants. These sessions provide unusually fertile occasions for contemporary novelists to reflect on their own work as James-inspired writers, as well as being an accessible and egalitarian forum for enhancing understanding among non-academic audiences.  

Professor Horne has humanised James for modern audiences – presenting him as a biographical subject on one of BBC Radio 4’s flagship programmes, Book of the Week, and in articles in the Times Literary Supplement – and demonstrated his continuing contemporary vitality through a dozen public events commemorating the centenary of James’s death in 2016. These cumulatively reached an audience of at least 2,055,000. 

Research synopsis

Facilitating Cultural Production and Enhancing Public Understanding through the Works of Henry James

Professor Philip Horne’s editorial and critical work on Henry James has shaped contemporary engagement with this major figure of 19th and early 20th century literature. His research on James’s notebooks led to the co-creation of Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Never Wrote, a collection of short stories, with ten major contemporary novelists. Professor Horne demonstrated James’s contemporary vitality through innovative public events and media engagement commemorating the centenary of James’s death in 2016, reaching 2 million people.  

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