This, a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, this classic new edition, the first time the biography has been reprinted in English, presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans’s life and work in all its various phases. Written with impeccable scholarship, it remains a standard work of reference to this day. Baldick’s notes have been extensively revised and updated by Brendan King to take account of new developments and publications in the field of Huysmansian studies. Like Froude’s biography of Carlyle, Holroyd’s Shaw, and Ellmann’s Joyce, Robert Baldick’s The Life of J.K. Huysmans is consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles.
Baldick has produced the authorative biography which supersedes all previous ones, and which is the soundest, fullest and most scholarly in any language. -- Enid Starkie in The New Statesman
