Greville Fane

Greville Fane: Henry James's Deliciously Barbed Revenge on the Bestseller
What happens when literature's most exacting craftsman turns his gaze on a novelist who churns out three potboilers a year without a moment's reflection? You get "Greville Fane," one of Henry James's slyest and most wickedly funny tales—a story that smiles politely while sharpening its knives.
On the surface, "Greville Fane" presents a story of sour relationships between a writer and her children. Mrs. Stormer, who publishes under the grand masculine pseudonym Greville Fane, is a warm, generous, utterly untalented woman who writes romantic fluff at industrial speed—and sells it by the cartload. Her reward? Two monstrously ungrateful children who bleed her dry while sneering at the very work that funds their pretensions. It's a domestic tragedy told with a comedian's timing, narrated by a fellow writer who genuinely likes the woman even as he winces at every sentence she produces.
"Greville Fane" is that resentment transmuted into art: a send-up of light literature written by a genius who watched lesser writers get rich. The joke, of course, is exquisitely Jamesian—Mrs. Stormer, who never thinks about her craft, is beloved and solvent; the narrator, who thinks of nothing else, is neither. James skewers the marketplace, the reading public, and perhaps, just a little, himself. It's petty, it's brilliant, and it's one of the most entertaining things he ever wrote. Read it and decide: is it satire, confession, or both?
John Gardner's resonant and intelligent voice perfectly embodies the character of the narrator.