(Published Secker & Warbug)
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It has been an interesting year for fans of the nineteenth century writer Henry James. The literary giant has put in an appearance in three novels – Colm Tóibín’s Booker Prize-nominated The Master, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty – and also in David Lodge’s entrancing Author, Author.
Although James is now remembered as a writer of substance and sensitivity, in the early 1890s his career was in crisis. His sales and advances, never high, had dwindled alarmingly and his optimistic solution was to start writing plays, a medium for which he had no real aptitude. Author, Author focuses on James’ middle years, as he gets bitten by the theatrical bug and discovers how it bites back.
A dramatisation of James’ early novel The American had only a modest success in 1891, and Guy Domville, on which he’d pinned his highest hopes, had a disastrous first night on 5 January 1895, when James took a curtain call to a barrage of boos and whistles. It was a decisive humiliation for Lodge’s dignified and sensitive James and became the turning-point of his career. To really rub salt into the wounds, the previous year one of his closest friends, the Punch cartoonist George Du Maurier, published a novel, Trilby, which unexpectedly became the best-seller of the century.
While James is the focus of the book, Lodge also relishes giving many other historical personages – including Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Bernard Shaw – walk on parts. Author, Author is wonderfully vivid in its depiction of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England and a fascinating peep into the background of one of American literature’s most respected authors. 
