Moving from Conrad to Henry James, the other writer of the same period whom Leavis fitted into the great tradition, is a leap into another world. The two would seem to have little in common except for their concern with subtle moral choices. One deals with work and duty, the other with conversations. Conrad has the world as his canvas, James the drawing rooms of the Anglo-Saxons. In Conrad, choices can lead to death, in James, they result in sex or its denial.

But despite this, James is undoubtedly one of the greatest of novelists, telling us about the ways in which people relate to each other, how power balances in relationships shift and adjust, how individuals use each other and allow themselves to be used. Sexuality is, obviously, an important element in the gamut of personal relations, and James wrote when women were coming into their own as social authorities too, owners of property, receiving not only education commensurate with that of men, but also sexual education, with such awareness no longer considered improper for virgins.

James is often described as giving centre stage in his novels to young ladies learning about the world, showing us ideal innocence coping through experience with social hypocrisy. Daisy Miller, his finest novella (the short novel James made peculiarly his own), deals with a lively American girl who does not allow herself to be constrained by convention.