In a footnote to A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle, 1895-1915,¹ Miranda Seymour remarks that “a glance at the social history of the British arts shows a striking lack of groups of novelists.” She acknowledges that British novelists have gotten to know each other, and that there have even been “coteries of writers,” but for her a coterie lacks the “defined artistic purpose” that distinguished the Lake Poets or the East Anglian School of painters. Even Bloomsbury does not qualify as a “group,” for, “while including many novelists,” it was merely “an aggregation of philosophers, historians, poets, and painters.” It is just as well that this remark appears at the end of Ms. Seymour’s book, for the reader is spared the task of trying to determine, at the outset, if Henry James’s “circle” was a group, a coterie, or an aggregation. On reflection, it doesn’t much matter, for Ms. Seymour is so wonderfully vague about definitions, and so delightfully entertaining about James and his friends, that one need give no further thought to the matter.

What we have in A Ringis the group portrait of a number of writers who settled in Sussex near Henry James at Lamb House, Rye, and who, according to Ms. Seymour, exhibited—among other talents—the fine art of personal duplicity and malice. The group’s principal members included Stephen Crane, who briefly lived at Brede Place, six miles inland from Rye, before his untimely death from tuberculosis in