Author, Author

Author, Author is a biographical novel by the English writer David Lodge, published in 2004 and based on the life of Henry James.

The book opens near the end of James's life, in his London house during the First World War, where a servant has picked up one of his stories to find out what her employer actually writes about, and it then goes back to the early 1880s to follow the years that made him. Lodge traces James's friendship with the Punch artist George Du Maurier and his attachment to the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, his period of work for the theatre, the public failure of his play Guy Domville, and his return to the form he was better at. Around James the novel places the literary figures of the period, so that the reader sees the world of late Victorian letters through the people he knew.

Lodge published the novel at the same time as Colm Toibin's The Master, another book about James, and wrote a separate account of what it was like to have two novels about the same life appear together.