James, Henry: John Delavoy, LIT, v.1, 18 January 2009.
 

Henry James (1843–1916)
John Delavoy (1900)

June Hee Chung’s summary:
‘The key conflict in “John Delavoy” (1898) is a popular magazine editor’s choice to reject an unnamed narrator’s critical review of a recently deceased “immense novelist,” John Delavoy , and instead to commemorate his life with a sketched picture and a biographical blurb by the deceased writer’s sister. Observing that the text serves “just to write round and round that portrait”, the narrator, turning an old proverb, grumbles, “I had always held that, like good wine, honest prose needed, as it were, no blush”’.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/henry_j...9.2.chung.html