Inclined to believe in Daisy’s innocence, he nevertheless makes at best a low-risk effort to warn her against the likely disaster that will result from her conduct. Though he blames Daisy’s Italian suitor for her death, he inwardly recognizes his own failure. But he has his rationale: ‘‘I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.’’ James’s ironic conclusion neatly pins Winterbourne wriggling to the wall: ‘‘Nevertheless, he went back to live in Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he is ‘studying’ hard—an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady.’’

There is nothing, though, in ‘‘An International Episode’’ or ‘‘Daisy Miller,’’ fine as they are, that prepares us for the subtle psychological realism of James’s depictions of the elusiveness of self-knowledge and the terrors of confronting one’s concealed motivations in the three premier stories of this volume, ‘‘The Aspern Papers,’’ ‘‘The Turn of the Screw,’’ and ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle.’’ Beginning in the 1880s with Portrait of a Lady (1881), which literary historians tend to think of as James’s breakthrough novel, the fate of Americans in Europe and the interaction between European sophistication and American innocence became more a matter of the heart and psyche than one of manners, social relations, and cultural differences. The narrator of the ‘‘The Aspern Papers’’ (1888), an American literary scholar and biographer, is also interested in a ‘‘very clever foreign lady,’’ so to speak: Julia Bordereau, an elderly American of great strength of character who has lived so long in Venice that she no longer has any national identity. Bordereau had been in her youth the lover and the adored lyric subject of the deceased world-famous English poet Jeffrey Aspern. A bachelor with no ties and no marital past, the biographer passionately desires to gain possession of a hidden cache of letters from Aspern to Bordereau, written when they were lovers. At first, Julia’s aim is to maintain the privacy of the papers. The narrator’s aim is to do everything in his power to wrest them from her, without illegality or violence, though his obsession with obtaining them eventually pushes him beyond the moral boundaries that are his normative standards, including manipulating Julia’s niece-caretaker to assist him, allowing her to fall in love with him without being scrupulous enough to consider what responsibilities such manipulation might entail. In order to provide for the financial security and marital protection of her niece, Julia is willing to give up the papers to prying and public eyes if the biographer will marry Tita Bordereau.

As with Winterbourne, though to a far greater extent since he is the narrator of his own story, the biographer’s heart and psyche become the focus: the subtle and self-deceiving patterns of feeling that expose to himself and others the deepest currents of his desire and self-definition. James creates a character whose self-exposure increasingly reveals an egomaniacally callous man whose machinations are eventually neutralized by his inability to take the final step. The price is too high. He cannot, in the end, marry Tita Bordereau because, as he explains to himself, she is elderly, unattractive, and inappropriate to his social status. The realism of this rationale appears unconvincing to the reader in relation to his intense desire to gain possession of the papers. It may best be understood as the cover that James provides for author and character. It allows James to dramatize without directly referencing the narrator’s homosexual panic, which explains his trauma and the flight he undertakes when he first learns of the stipulation under which he can have the papers. For someone who has revealed himself willing to go to almost any length to obtain them, his revulsion at taking that step speaks not of rational evaluation (such as consideration of an unconsummated marriage of mutual convenience) but of an affront so deep to his sexual identity that no alternative is possible but withdrawal. After much hesitation, anguish, and self-criticism, he determines to have a second go at getting the papers, still on his own terms and still without paying the marital price. ‘‘I would not unite myself [to her] and yet I would have them.’’ Before he can implement any new strategy, Tita burns the letters, an expression of her guilelessness and transparency. The needy and honest lady had taken him at his word and then done what Miss Julia requested.

James’s homoeroticism has become a given in modern biographical and critical studies of the author and his work. As with authors in general, he is every place in his fiction, diffused and imaginatively re-created but nevertheless a real presence. For the biographer, aware of the wide reach of the accusation ‘‘publishing scoundrel’’ (Julia Bordereau’s charge against the American biographer), the distance between James’s own sexuality and that of the narrator of the novella is discernible enough to be noticed but not great enough to be emphasized. James works with indirection, hints that are often unmistakably clear without ever being verbally explicit. In that situation, we are all reading and writing ‘‘scoundrels,’’ so to speak, compelled to follow our interpretative preoccupations, including the biographical, and gain possession of what we pursue.

James tempts us into close critical readings of and clever methodological approaches to his texts as much if not more than any other writer of his period. ‘‘The Turn of the Screw’’ has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story. Its psychological and epistemological complexities have received the most attention, focusing on such questions as: What is ‘‘real’’ and what is ‘‘unreal’’ in this narrative and how are we to know? How reliable a narrator is the governess? Does she really see the dead servants who supposedly have corrupted the children or are they figments of her hysterical imagination? Is the governess a force for good or for evil in the lives of the children? Are her attraction to her employer and her own repressed sexuality triggers for her state of mind or has she actually seen wicked ghosts who desire to take full possession of her two young charges? There seems almost no end to the inquiries the narrative promotes, including why the children’s uncle wants to have no contact with them and why he leaves them totally in the hands of servants. And what has young Miles done to warrant being expelled from school? Is his infraction only moral or is it also criminal, or is it criminal-sexual, something unspeakable by Victorian standards, like masturbation or sodomy, that he has learned from and practiced with the nefarious but dead Quince? And the overarching question that critics have asked is whether or not James, engaged in creating what he called a ‘‘pot-boiler and a jeu d’esprit,’’ intended that the tale provide answers to these questions at all. The indeterminacy, if not the impossibility, of answers—perhaps the final turn of the screw—may provide much of the power that the story conveys.

The riveting impact of ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle,’’ uncomplicated by ghost-story machinery, stems from the acuity of its psychological portrait of a man ruled by the conviction that he has been destined at birth for some extraordinary experience that, as life passes, seems not only unrealized but unidentified. John Marcher’s sense of special or exceptional destiny in the end reduces to a lifetime of holding himself apart from rather than embracing experience, as with so many of James’s male characters.