“When first I knew her she had published
half-a-dozen fictions, and I believe I had also perpetrated a novel. She was more than a dozen years older than I,
but she was a person who always acknowledged her relativity…. I met her at some dinner and took her down,
rather flattered at offering my arm to a celebrity. She didn’t look like one, with her matronly,
mild, inanimate face, but I supposed her greatness would come out in her
conversation. I gave it all the
opportunities I could, but I was not disappointed when I found her only a dull,
kind woman. This was why I liked her—she
rested me so from literature. To myself
literature was an irritation, a torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the
intellectual part of it like a Creole in a hammock. She was not a woman of genius, but her
faculty was so special, so much a gift out of hand, that I have often wondered
why she fell below that distinction.
This was doubtless because the transaction, in her case, had remained
incomplete; genius always pays for the gift, feels the debt, and she was
placidly unconscious of obligation. She could invent stories by the yard, but
she couldn’t write a page of English.
She went down to her grave without suspecting that though she had
contributed volumes to the diversion of her contemporaries she had not
contributed a sentence to the language.”—American novelist, short-story writer,
and critic Henry James (1843-1916), “Greville Fane,” in Selected Tales, edited by
John Lyon (2001)
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