In the late 1980s, it would not have been obvious that Henry James was to become one of the most discussed figures in literary criticism concerned with sexuality, more specifically with same-sex desire and the development of homosexual identities. Since then, of course, ‘queer theory’ has gained a foothold in the academy, studies of ‘lesbian and gay writing’ are more and more frequent in English departments, and literary representations of same-sex desire and dissident sexual identities – in writing from the medieval period onwards – have received considerable attention by literary critics. James himself has become one of the writers most frequently associated with ‘queer’ literary criticism. As this study developed, so too did the intellectual apparatus with which to consider questions of sexuality in literary texts. Psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality have not been displaced, but critics have increasingly acknowledged that desire and sexuality are constructed differently in different historical periods and cultural locations. Such observations are now commonplace, but are worth repeating in a book on Henry James, for several reasons.

Literary criticism has been reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which James was implicated in the late Victorian culture of sexuality – a culture in which scientific constructions of sexuality gained increasing prestige, and in which a newly punitive legal régime contributed to the stigmatization of the sexual ‘deviant’; a culture which witnessed individuals who resisted such stigmatization and criminalization, and who mobilized under the very sign of deviance.