(1907–9).

1908 *‘Julia Bride’. *‘The Jolly Corner’. Depressed by poor sales of New York Edition and various illnesses. Burns private papers. Italian Hours (travel).

1910 Still profoundly depressed. Travels in Germany with ailing William; they return to the USA after death of Robertson, June. William dies, August. Spends winter in America.

1911–12 Honorary degree from Harvard. Returns to England and takes flat in Chelsea. Honorary degree from Oxford.

1913 Presented with a golden bowl by admirers, and has his portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, both as part of seventieth birthday celebrations. First volume of autobiography. A Small Boy and Others.

1914 Notes of a Son and Brother. Profoundly disturbed by outbreak of the Great War, visits wounded and refugees in hospital. Notes on Novelists (mainly the nineteenth-century French realists) published.

1915 Becomes a British subject to change his status as wartime ‘alien’. Suffers stroke in December.

1916 Awarded Order of Merit by George V, New Year’s Day. Dies, 28 February. Funeral in Chelsea Old Church; ashes buried in family grave, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1917 Publication of The Middle Years (autobiography) and works of fiction

– The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, both incomplete. 1921–3 Complete edition of novels and tales published by Macmillan.

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Typically James would publish a tale in a magazine, revise it for publication as part of a collection of tales and revise again for subsequent publications, including the great but commercially unsuccessful 24-volume New York Edition (1907–9). It is the texts of the New York Edition which are printed here. Any choice of one text over another involves losses as well as gains. What is lost here is the possibility first, to have direct experience of James the young writer and secondly, to see, moving from early tales to late, a broad view of his development as a writer. However, the latter has already been forfeited by the drastic selection of a mere 19 stories out of 112. The gain, in choosing the texts of the New York Edition, lies, first, in being true to the fact of revision as a central aspect of James’s creativity (never merely as an afterthought), and secondly – this point is admittedly contentious, a matter of taste and for critical argument – in printing what the present editor believes are, by and large, better versions than their earlier incarnations. Jamesian revision is overwhelmingly improvement; he did not convert earlier lucidities into what some feel to be the indirect obscurities of the late style, and indeed, many of the revisions serve greater precision, clarity and vividness. Here the reader will find in the Notes of ‘Four Meetings’ and ‘Daisy Miller’ a selection of wording variants between the first magazine publication and the New York Edition, so he or she can get a sense of James as reviser. However, other large changes are less easily represented in notes – in particular, the general lightening of punctuation in the New York Edition. Its much scantier use of the comma diminishes the controlling, shaping and placing that such punctuation often entails. The reader thus is more involved in a continuous experience of wondering and puzzling, has perhaps to work harder in making provisional sense of the story as it unfolds, but is rewarded by a more thoroughgoing engagement in interpretative play.

Penguin house-styling has been minimized: double quotation marks are made singles (and vice versa), stops in personal titles and abbreviations are dropped (Mr, Mrs, Dr, St), dashes are spaced en-dashes, vowels are not ligatured and punctuation following a single italic word is not italicized. The unusual spaced contractions of the New York Edition (e.g. I ’d, would n’t) have been regularized, but its spelling and punctuation have been retained.