Books: With Two Countries

THE GREAT SHORT NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES—edited by Philip Rahv— Dial Press ($4).

In his brilliant youth, the one English novelist that young Henry James of New York, Albany, Newport and Boston admired was George Eliot. He studied her works, wrote essays about her, sent her autographed copies of his first two books. When, at 26, he went to England to live, in 1869, he was taken to visit her as solemnly as a promising recruit led into the presence of the general. It was a doleful experience. George Eliot sat glum and uncommunicative, old,...