James's character was full of contradictions. He was witty and melancholy, formidable and vulnerable, suavely brutal and imperiously kind. He was fiercely private and exuberantly sociable, guarded in many of his friendships, overt and demonstrative in his passions. Drawing on new material and using new illustrations, Miranda Seymour has recreated the last twenty years of James's life in England, when he became master of Lamb House in Rye and the focal consciousness of a disparate band of writers who had settled in East Sussex -- H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, W.H. Hudson. Only Wells was thoroughly British; he saw his neighbors -- James included -- as a ring of foreign conspirators plotting to transform the nature of British writing. - Jacket flap.