James wrote literary criticism from the beginning. He began reviewing in his early twenties, concentrating on novels. He deplored the absence of ‘any critical treatise upon fiction’ in his first piece for the North American Review in 1864, after drifting away from his study of law at Harvard (Life, i. 175). The reviews were quickly joined by short stories and eventually, in the next decade, by the novels, but he remained a stylish and knowledgeable critic, sought after by editors. Literary journalism, like travelwriting, was an important source of his earnings. He was a reviewer of painting and drama, rarely of poetry, and most influentially of novels, doing for his art what Aristotle did for tragedy and Coleridge for Shakespeare and Wordsworth.

Like many English novelists from Defoe onwards, James began as a journalist, and his reviewing was intimately related to his creative writing in a way which continued throughout his life. He learnt to write as a journalist, needing to shape and enliven his prose in the business of attracting readers. Though his style grew less concise and more mannered, he remains one of the few entertaining literary critics. When he read his lecture on Browning, ‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’, the audience murmured with pleasure at his language. He followed a standard of excellence set in America by such editors as Charles Eliot Norton, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, W. D. Howells, and James Russell Lowell, and in England by such critics as A. E. Dallas, G. H. Lewes and Marian Evans, who offered knowledge, intelligent judgement, and style. The Victorian novelists – Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot – learnt their trade in brief pieces intended to amuse, often sheltering under an absence of signature. As Roger Gard says, introducing Henry James. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, James's ‘literary criticism is so vivacious, informative, and elegant that few readers will find it other than a pleasure to read’.

Gard contrasts two main responses to James's criticism: an exaggerated attention to the theoretical implications and influences of the Preface to the New York Edition, and Leavis's view of James as a pragmatic, impressionistic, and occasional critic, whose work, ‘was determined by his own creative preoccupations’.