'No one has written better than Henry James about the vocation o: writing, its isolate ecstasies and public humiliations, and the implacable demands it places upon those who devote their lives to its practice. Take the 1888 novella The Lesson of the Master, in which a tyro scribe enters the circle o: Henry St George, a literary eminence now past his prime. In a series of conversations, the senior writer tutors the junior in the inescapable trade-off literature will require of him. It seems he must choose between the lone.y perfection of art and the disabling entanglements of marriage and children.' (Introduction)