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.