Dearly Beloved Friends makes available an ample selection of James's personal and occasionally intimate letters -- many long withheld from publication -- to four men: the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, the dilettante Dudley Jocelyn Persse, and the writers Howard Sturgis and Sir Hugh Walpole. The letters reveal a warm and humorous man, far from the austere persona we usually associate with James. He clearly loved a number of those friends with a depth and eroticism previously noted but never so fully documented.
Susan E. Gunter is Professor of English at Westminster College. Steven H. Jobe is Associate Professor of English at Hanover College.