Notes on Novelists is a book of literary criticism by Henry James published in 1914. The book collected essays that James had written over the preceding two decades on French, Italian, English and American writers. The book also contained a controversial essay, The New Novel, 1914, which passed judgment on various contemporary writers and occasioned much disagreement.This is one of the last books that James saw through the press, and it contains his most mature and considered opinions on a number of writers. For instance, George Sand, an early enthusiasm of his, here becomes only a fading though pretty memory: "Her work, beautiful, plentiful and fluid, has floated itself out to sea even as the melting snows of the high places are floated."