Gossip from Lamb House

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.

James himself longed for fame but fearing the ‘postmortem exploiter’ he burned most of the letters he received — including those from Mrs Ford. Mrs Bleach, therefore, had to guess at many of the references, which are not really important anyway: London personalities, servants, dogs, plants, illnesses, tea parties and lunches. The letters are gossipy, health-obsessed (James was a depressive and suffered from gout and shingles) and, unless he was sad or very ill, are written in an elaborate, super-affectionate style. He thanks Mrs Ford in advance for the waistcoat she has promised to knit for him:

I thought such effusion mere twaddle until I remembered that my mother and her three sisters, only a few decades younger than James and also Boston-reared, wrote to each other almost daily in the same terms.