In the early 2000s, David Lodge discovered to his dismay that Colm Toibin and he were both writing biographical novels about Henry James. Toibin's The Master and Lodge's Author, Author!, however, were all the more interesting for appearing almost together, for they provided such different insights into so similar a story. At the same time, distinguished scholar Peter Brooks and a younger scholar, Angus Wrenn, were working on books about James and French art and literature. The study of "The French influence" on James and his writing is as old as scholarly study of James, as Wrenn points out in his introduction to Henry James and the Second Empire (3). Since Marie Gamier in 1927, from Michael Anesko to Christof Wegelin, by way of Edwin Sill Fusseil, David Gervais, Philip Grover, Philip Home, Leland S. Person, Lyall Powers, William Stowe, and Adeline Tintner, James scholars (including Brooks in his earlier work) have examined James's French literary and cultural sources, influences, and context to such an extent that one might wonder what else one could contribute to the subject. Henr3, James and the Second Empire answers this question and offers a valuable contribution to the study of James and France by focusing on a particular group of French writers at a particular time in French history. Whereas earlier books examined James's fiction in comparison with particular French writers (Brooks's Melodramatic Imagination, Stowe, Gervais) and virtually all focused on James in relation to canonical writers like Balzac, Sand, and Flaubert, only Powers's Henry James and the Naturalist Movement examined James in relation to a discrete, homogeneous group of French writers. And only Tintner (in The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James) and I, taking a cue from Marcia Jacobson's Henry James and the Mass Market, focused on James and now-forgotten but once famous writers like Octave Feuillet, Edmond About, and Victor Cherbuliez.