Oliver Herford is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Henry James's Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 (2016) and a past president of the Henry James Society. He has published widely on James in journals and edited collections – on topics including his reading of Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac, his allusive style and his practice of commemoration – and has also published on life-writing and letter-writing in the circle of John Keats.
'These unexpectedly moving prefaces offer us a chance to salute his strange and lonely genius.' Paul Dean, New Criterion 'formidable' M. C., The Times Literary Supplement 'Herford's explanatory notes are … as long and very nearly as intricate as the prefaces themselves. They track allusions and references, provide bits of biography, along with a great deal of history and even some late-Victorian gossip, and above all catch the way a given phrase echoes off other moments in James's work. They showed me things about these old friends that I did not know and represent not only an enormous amount of research, but also a feel for the novelist's prose and sensibility that goes deeper than bone.' Oliver Herford, The Times Literary Supplement