Selected Tales of Henry James Henry James

The Real Thing was written by Henry James in 1891. According to his notebook entry on February 22, 1891, the idea for the story came in the form of an actual incident divulged by his friend George du Maurier. James juxtaposes an upper-class...

The Turn of the Screw has been read by some analysts as a straightforward ghost story and by others as a psychologically accurate – whether pre-or post-Freudian -- portrait of mental illness or repression breaking out. However enjoyable it is...

Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady presents the reader with a novel that uses literary form in an attempt to frame the life of its female protagonist; the very title – ‘Portrait’ – expresses a double meaning, referring both to the representation...

This essay examines the differences and similarities between two texts: The Venus of Ille and The Last of the Valerii. The first is a French short story written by Prosper Mérimée in 1835 and the second is short story written by Henry James in...

“The Aspern Papers” by Henry James is about a nameless man who is willing to do anything in order to achieve his goal concerning an obsession with a writer. In the story, this nameless character who is both the narrator and the main character,...

The words of critics Todorov, Harvey, and Short gesture to various narrative aspects in Henry James’s short stories, including the existence of an essential secret, a dramatized consciousness, and a length and complexity of sentences. These...