F. O. Matthiessen's The James Family (1947) served an important introductory role for the developing scholarly study of the Jameses. R. W. B. Lewis's The Jameses: A Family Narrative, when it appeared (1991), was useful to general readers as a succinct introduction to the James family and was valuable to James scholarship for the new material it included (for instance on the more recent generations of Jameses). Paul Fisher, in House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family, acknowledges both the "superlative work" of his predecessors and the many biographies of individual Jameses that have appeared since The James Family. He justifies issuing a new family biography by stating that "an up-to-date critical perspective" and "Whole new theoretical structures about gender and sexuality have emerged since most of the James biographies were written" (5). While this justification might lead readers to expect biographical revelations resulting from, say, a queer theory approach to the Jameses, what House of Wits delivers is an interpretation of the Jameses as a dysfunctional family of neurotics, alcoholics, and repressed sexual libidos. Central to this interpretation is an extension of Alfred Habegger's treatment of Henry James Sr.'s wild youth and a revisiting of Leon Edel's "Freudian" (a word Fisher uses often) sibling rivalry between William and Henry. This interpretation is original in being applied to the entire family, but, in a period when much James scholarship is about "mental illness, alcoholism, love, sex, homosexuality, money, the roles of women and men, and the pressures of professional and artistic success" (5), it is not easy to see the book's realization of its stated overall approach as new.