In this brief account of Henry James's twentieth-century life and writing, I have combined a scan of his last fifteen years’ work in every major literary genre except poetry, with a close reading of ‘The Jolly Corner’, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sacred Fount. I have concentrated on two recurring subjects, history and imagination.

One of the most inward-looking of novelists, James is concerned with the determination and construction of identity. Like Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady, though disinterestedly, he asks, ‘What shall we call our “self”? where does it begin? where does it end?’ (ch. 19). His subject is the self and what Madame Merle calls ‘the whole envelope of circumstances’ and the enquiry into circumstances is increasingly occupied with the politics of women's and men's restriction and liberation. The last decade and a half, from 1900 to his death in 1916, is also the period when he shows most complexly his implicit and explicit interest in creativity and imagination. The themes are associated: James shows imagination as a means of seeing the socially constructed and restricted self, in a pragmatic and particular way. Some characters, like Strether and Merton Densher, dissociate themselves, choosing neutrality; others, like Maggie Verver, achieve a measure of liberation. Such visions are not mimetic. His characters, like their author, conduct an enquiry into experience, tentatively and provisionally, with a clear reflexive sense of narrative imagination's fiction and fantasy. Their self awareness refracts their author's. While not suggesting that his subject is restricted, I have concentrated on these linked themes, one external, one internal, in a close reading of reflexive language and structure in examples of his later art.

I have not taken the works in chronological order, but grouped them according to genre, after beginning with ‘The Jolly Corner’, a story written in 1908, later than the three major novels. I consider it a model text which lucidly expresses the themes of history and imagination, and teaches us how to read James by highlighting his use of reflexive narrative and imagery. I concentrate on this story and four of the novels, but also say something about other late stories, two unfinished novels, plays, biography, travel-writing, and autobiographies.