In the preceding pages we have seen how James's fiction negotiates the thrills and ravages and difficulties of sexual identity and of the failure of identity, working through masochistic fantasy, the melancholia of systemic prohibition, and the shame and frisson of transgressive sexual desires. We have noted how the fiction names that which should not be named and creates a poetics of the obscene at odds with its perfectly genteel surface. These poetic figurations of the queer body and of transgressive desires are surprising in a corpus of writing frequently regarded as sexually timid, and lie like violent surprises, fractures, land mines in a deceptively serene landscape.

These faultlines might open up a biographical question: could James have been aware of the extreme eroticism contained on the figurative surface of his prose? Such a question might be asked of James's earliest fiction. Leon Edel writes that Watch and Ward, his first novel, written in 1870, contains ‘persistent erotic imagery and innocent erotic statement which seems to have been set down with bland unconsciousness on the author's part’. Here the ‘seems’ acknowledges, however, that the ‘unconsciousness’ is hypothesized by the critic. Perhaps James, at twenty-seven, was not so naive. The extreme self-consciousness of James's late writing – the way in which the fiction humourously alludes to the unsaid or that which is nearly said – suggests an authorial irony, one aspect of which is the author's own absence and consequent inability to verify whether or not the fiction means what it appears to be meaning.