In ‘The Diary of a Man of Fifty’, a short story first published in 1879, Henry James describes a man actively engaged in the process of reconstituting his past – a process not dissimilar to that which would characterise James's own autobiographical narratives of over thirty years later. In a succession of diary entries (in themselves a form of autobiography) the middle-aged hero of James's tale, revisiting Florence, is prompted to revive memories of an unhappy love affair conducted there years before. Initially the past seems quite familiar, a sequence of events recalled with unerring accuracy. ‘Everything is so perfectly the same’, he notes, ‘that I seem to be living my youth over again.’ But the process of memory soon proves to be surprising, as things once thought forgotten return unexpectedly to active consciousness, prompting the narrator to ask, ‘What in the world became of them? Whatever becomes of such things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where do they hide themselves away? In what unvisited cupboards and crannies of our being do they preserve themselves?’ (334). The sequence of unearthed memories proves endless, chaotic and a touch oppressive (‘They have been crowding upon me ever so thickly’ (339)), with each recollection suggestive of something further: ‘Everything reminds me of something else, and yet of itself at the same time.’ The diarist's recapturing of the image of his lost love becomes a physical as much as a mental act, one in which his senses strain to be released from the confines of the present: ‘The place was perfectly empty – that is, it was filled with her.