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Henry James’s Waistcoat: Letters to Mrs Ford, 1907-1915

Gossip from Lamb House

Foreword by Philip Horne, edited by Rosalind Bleach
Stone Trough Books, 79pp, £18,

Jonathan Mirsky

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Jonathan Mirsky on a new collection of Henry James's letters

In 1999, Rosalind Bleach, whose mother had just died, opened for the first time her rosewood bureau with a swivel top and four drawers. She discovered 41 letters written between 1907 and 1915 by the Master — Henry James — to Mrs Ford, a now nearly forgotten upper-middle-class woman who lived at Budds, a country house six miles from James’s house at Rye.

Everything about these letters breathes another age. James wrote, with a Harrods stylograph pen, or dictated, up to 40,000 letters, which eventually will be published in perhaps 140 volumes. These letters to Mrs Ford have never been seen before. Rosalind Bleach doesn’t know how her mother — a beautiful, secretive Bletchley code-breaking veteran — got them, except that they may have been given to her by Mrs Ford’s son, Morton, a minor composer before the Great War. It is another sign of the age that Bleach and her sister knew as children that they must never peep into the bureau —and didn’t until their mother was dead.

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