Henry James was a Victorian, an Edwardian, and a modernist. His career is a progress and a continuity, not chopped up into tidy literary-historical periods, but its dense complexity makes chronological separation valuable, especially in a short study. Though all his writing is original and innovative, the last period is exceptionally rich and full.

James died on 28 February 1916, and in the fifteen years of his twentieth-century life became one of the inaugurators of a new epoch. His experiments in fictional voice and form break away from the structures of Victorian fiction to group themselves contemporaneously and proleptically with new form-makers and form-breakers like Conrad – whom James admired with reservations – and Lawrence, whom James did not admire. His new way with point of view, conclusion, symbolism, and pronounced formal features, which became more daring in the late work, anticipates Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Woolf, Mann, and Beckett.

The mass and range of his later work are as impressive as their novelty: into the last decade and a half he crammed three of the most remarkable novels in European and American literature, two smaller novels, a number of good stories, his long three-part autobiography, reassessments of his European ancestors and contemporaries, Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev and Zola, some of the most influential and analytic criticism of fiction ever written, a biography, travel-writing, essays, reviews, lectures, and two fascinatingly unfinished novels. He supervised the big New York Edition of his Novels and Tales published between 1907 and 1909, for which he made extensive revisions, but gained few rewards in sales or appreciation. He looked back on his Victorian identity and, in Yeats's phrase, remade himself, startlingly and appropriately, since the remaking of self is his recurring subject. He was aware that to remake is to unmake, jokingly using the franglais verb se blottir, though clarifying rather than expunging. He is piercingly alive to transformation, feeling its processes in the brain and thinking them in the nerves. He loves to transform characters – Brydon, Strether, Kate, Merton Densher, Amerigo, Maggie. He loves transformation scenes – in gardens, parks, drawing-rooms, theatres, and galleries. He himself transforms language and perception.