The publication of this new collection is a major event in James studies because it makes available for the first time all his extant letters within a given period. Since the time of Percy Lubbock's original 1920 selection, readers have been given different choices of James letters, sometimes not even reprinted in their entirety. Leon Edel's 1956 selection at least tried to rectify the limited projection of James as a self-involved aesthete by including some of his business letters. At long last we now have a complete edition, which reproduces James's own corrections as he was writing the letters and gives scrupulous annotations, ending with a biographical register of all correspondents.

The period covered runs up to James's return to Cambridge after his first independent tour of the Continent and sheds fascinating light on his beginnings as a writer. His first correspondent was Thomas Sergeant Perry, to whom he describes his experiences of school in Geneva during 1859 and his first walking tour. Even at this early stage we can see how James used his letters to family and friends to strike stances relevant to his planned career. To Perry we find addressed his first joking references to himself as a writer and his first reflections on his American identity, where he finds it a positive advantage not to have a “national stamp.” The 1860s were a crucial decade for the young James in broadening his literary contacts (he met W. D. Howells in 1866) and in beginning his career as a writer by approaching Charles Eliot Norton at the North American Review. His selection of works to review already reflects his growing interest in French culture, an interest reflected in the fact that he wrote parts of these letters in French. Already we can witness him developing a nuanced, ironic style of expression, and even more importantly he is beginning to theorize his own identity as an American, rationalizing his travels as a strategy to “pick and choose” aspects of civilization. Indeed, it would be impossible to overstate the importance to him of the travelling he describes in this period. Every place he visits catches his imagination; and every place has its drawbacks. London is the “murky metropolis”; on the other hand, it did offer him a unique opportunity to visit figures like William Morris.

James's first independent visit to Switzerland filled him with enthusiasm for the landscape which he experienced through walking tours and yet the appeal of “pure nature” soon palled and he became restless to move on to Italy. In recording his experiences for his family James takes striking care to stress that he is using his time wisely, spending economically, and generally building up a stock of “capital” that he was to draw on in his fiction. Thus his travelling included study; he read Mill on women at Vevey gave very detailed accounts of the works of art he saw in Italy. By this point two developments had taken place in James. Now he was beginning to distinguish between national cultural landscapes (Italy was the country of “elegance and grace”). And at the same time his perception of fellow American travellers was souring. They were “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,” he exclaimed to his mother, but those living abroad did at least offer him contacts since Italian society proved very difficult to penetrate. His time in Rome probably marked the climax to this tour in bombarding his imagination with a medley of “effects” and a constant stream of picturesque images.

These letters reveal the full extent of a problem besetting James on his travels, namely chronic constipation. This was so bad that he spent time at a Great Malvern clinic taking a water cure. When he reached Italy the diet seems to have eased things somewhat, though he confided to his brother that he still had to resort to a portable enema (his “little squirt”). Indeed the problem was so severe that it affected James's itinerary, whether or not he could read, and took him to the Border Marches at Malvern, whose landscape he rhapsodically incorporated into early stories like “A Passionate Pilgrim.” Return to Britain inevitably took him back to Malvern, from where he admitted to his sister Alice and to William that he was developing a special feeling for England.

During his travels, we witness James's famous grasping imagination at work. Recomposing images for his correspondents is one of the main functions of his letters, which also helped him come to terms with the premature death of his cousin Minny Temple. In a series of letters written soon after he heard the news James attempts to compose an image of Minny which will offset his loss. Quite explicitly he transforms her from external fact to the world of thought. The process was particularly acute for James because she was such a close relative. His main correspondents were the other members of his family, especially his brother William; hence his habit in these years of signing himself “Henry James, Jr.” and hence too his care to keep a close track of his expenditure throughout his travels, demonstrating his sense of filial responsibility. These volumes are the first in a complete edition of James's letters and they set a very high standard for subsequent volumes to follow.