In his extraordinarily sustained and productive literary career, Henry James (1843–1916) published fifteen novels, as well as travel books, criticism and essays, and a collection of short stories and ‘nouvelles’ which runs to 111 stories in Leon Edel's twelve-volume edition. He was undoubtedly the literary master of his age, both in America and in England (where he spent much of his life, settling there in 1898), and brought to fiction a searching inwardness of perception and a refinement of style that are unique. His greatest novels, like Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886) and The Ambassadors (1903), will doubtless always command the most widespread literary attention, but his achievement in the short and long story is itself a major one, and would assure his classic status even without the novels. He himself wrote in a letter of 1871: ‘To write a series of good little tales I deem ample work for a lifetime. I dream that my lifetime shall have done it.’ And it did.

What James found in the short story form was the possibility for mobility of ‘point of view’ and variety of attack. A conversation with the French critic Hippolyte Taine in 1889 had the effect, he wrote in his Notebooks,