There has been a quiet revolution: new readings in the last ten years or so have overturned our perceptions of the erotic in Henry James's fictions. For all the variations in emphasis and the differences in tone, new ways of explicitly addressing the homoerotic in his writing have made themselves quickly at home in our awareness. They seem indeed to have taken up space that was ready and waiting for them. We had needed ways of including something that had been missing from our account of the work (although if we had read the letters it could hardly have been missing from our imagining of James's life); we needed a critical vocabulary to encompass the whole passional range of this writer whose register of passionate feeling was distinctively not delimited by the conventions of the heterosexual pursuit. Whether we now choose to discuss a James deeply preoccupied with homosexual secrets and ‘panics’, as Eve Kosovsky-Sedgwick does; or a serene James remarkably ‘exempt from alarm, anxiety and remorse’ about his ‘queerness’, as Hugh Stevens does; or whatever other account we choose to give ourselves of what this passional force means and does inside the writing, the debate has been changed, and all the fictions are illuminated from a slightly different place from now onwards.

Inevitably, readings of a homoerotic James have complicated an older and very persistent account of him as an unsexual writer, prudish and allergic to things of the flesh.