Partial Portraits. The Art of Fiction

“The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle or the needle without the thread.” This is an ode to creative freedom by the author of “The Portrait of a Lady” and “The Turn of the Screw.” James argues against “laws” in fiction-writing, whether they are literary or moral. The book also includes essays about George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev, and other prominent writers.