A collection of letters by the novelist Henry James has been found at a house in Eynsham.

One hundred years after the letters were written to a neighbour of her late mother's, Oxford writer Rosalind Bleach has published them in a book called Henry James's Waistcoat.

Mrs Bleach, who found the letters in a bureau while clearing her mother's house, decided to edit the letters herself with help from a Henry James expert, Prof Philip Horne of University College, London.

She said: "The bureau was always in my family home but I knew I should never look inside it. Even when my sister and I moved my mother to Oxfordshire after she had a stroke, we felt it was still private.

"It was only a few weeks after she died, when we realised that the house would have to be cleared, that I found the letters."

Mrs Bleach added: "The letters are warm, witty, gossipy and sometimes, as both writers are catapulted into the tragedies of the First World War, deeply melancholy - and they are always beautifully written.

"The subject matter is neighbourly, rather than literary, but has its own value. James's close associate, the author Edith Wharton, once said of him: 'his heart was even more interesting to contemplate than his mind'."

Prof Horne added: "Even in the comparative triviality of these exchanges, James's style - his genius for expression - never deserts him.

"Conjuring up as it does a lost, privileged circle of friendship and kindness, it has what James sometimes called a minor magic, enriching our sense of how much, emotionally, generously, imaginatively, he gave himself to these many friendships.

"One day these light tokens of an evident affection will doubtless be rolled up into the onward march of the Complete Letters - but in this volume they constitute a story of their own.

"It has its own completeness, and makes a special appeal because of the touching way in which the editor has described how they came down to her."

  • Colin and Christine Burden, from Meadow Lane, Iffley, recently discovered signed letters from Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto - assassinated on December 27 - hidden in the case which was tucked away in a corner of their study.

The suitcase belonged to Mr Burden's late brother David, who spent his career working for the Oxford Union, which Ms Bhutto led in 1977.