The ambassadors /

As Bradbury (Univ. of Reading, UK) writes in her introduction, The Ambassadors is considered exemplary of the writer's "major phase." It has been the focus of much scholarship and is often included in American literature courses. Although many editions of The Ambassadors are available, with various kinds of apparatus, this one is impressively comprehensive. Besides the text, for which the editors of "The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James" chose the first published English edition (1903), Bradbury provides a cogent and illuminating 86-page introduction that combines biographical material with an overview of the work's development, publication history, literary contexts, and reception. Also included are a chronology of James's life; a glossary of foreign words; 45 pages of notes; and nearly 50 pages examining textual variants in the many versions that James published, edited, and revised. There are also three appendixes: a transcript of James's plan for the book ("Project of Novel"), excerpts from his notebooks of September 1895 to October 1896, and excerpts from the well-known preface to the New York edition. The last two are probably extraneous, since the full text of both the notebooks and the preface have been published in full in other volumes. Overall, admirable scholarship. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Linda Simon, Skidmore College