May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), p. 8.

2. Henry James, Preface to ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1227.

3. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 54, 57.

4. The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 97.

5. F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family: A Group Biography (1947; New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 303.

6. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 52–3.

7. Ibid., p. 53.

8. Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), pp. 248, 249.

9. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 555.

10. Henry James, Preface to ‘The Lesson of the Master’, in Literary Criticism: French Writers, pp. 1229–30.

11. Henry James, Preface to ‘Daisy Miller’ (1909), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, pp. 1270–71.

12. Complete Notebooks, ed. Edel and Powers, p. 195.

13. Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, pp. 1170–71.

14. Henry James, Preface to The Spoils of Poynton (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, p. 1138.

15. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech; The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), p. 10.

16. On the comedy of names generally, see Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); on James’s playful naming – and in particular on the implications for sexuality and gender of such play, see Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

17. Henry James, ‘The Story-Teller at Large: Mr Henry Harland’ (1898), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, p. 285.

18. For the important and influential argument that James’s narratives are dependent on a secret or an absent cause, see Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Secret of Narrative’, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 143–78.

19. In Twentieth Century Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.