Table of Contents

Preface 1. Henry James and Narrative Meaning 2. "Daisy Miller" and Washington Square 3. Isabel Archer and the Affronting of Plot 4. The Determinate Plot: The Bostonians 5. The Determinate Plot: The Princess Casamassima 6. "The Aspern Papers": The Unvisitable Past 7. The Disengagement from "Things": The Spoils of Poynton 8. "The Turn of the Screw" 9. The Language of Silence: What Maisie Knew 10. The Inaccessible Future: "The Beast in the Jungle" 11. The Presence of Potentiality: "The Jolly Corner" 12. The Wings of the Dove 13. The Ambassadors Notes Index

Reviews

I admire Millicent Bell’s eloquent, wise, subtle book. There can be no higher praise than to say it is entirely worthy of its great subject: our most immense writer and the questions about narrative method and moral intelligence raised by his work.
*Susan Sontag*

In this beautiful interweaving of psychological insight and narrative analysis, Millicent Bell unfolds the means by which Henry James produces fiction that is simultaneously naturalist and mythological. On page after page she locates the explosive quality of James’s investigative prose.
*Roger Shattuck*

I admire Millicent Bell's eloquent, wise, subtle book. There can be no higher praise than to say it is entirely worthy of its great subject: our most immense writer and the questions about narrative method and moral intelligence raised by his work. -- Susan Sontag
In this beautiful interweaving of psychological insight and narrative analysis, Millicent Bell unfolds the means by which Henry James produces fiction that is simultaneously naturalist and mythological. On page after page she locates the explosive quality of James's investigative prose. -- Roger Shattuck