This chapter focuses on examples of Henry James’s post-1890 writings – including Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) – which engage with, or themselves embody, the challenge of commemorating lives cut short prematurely or traumatically. The first half addresses formal and stylistic features and explores how James’s commitment to conserving and commemorating the unspent experiential potential of the dead of the American Civil War manifests within his late aesthetics: informing syntax, notions of character, and the pressure placed on traditional narrative structures. The subsequent sections then trace a competing phenomenon, inspired in part by the author’s meditations on Civil War Monuments: the concern that several of James’s late works (both fictional and non-fictional) display about the wisdom of investing emotionally in the unlived lives of the untimely dead. Together, these sections argue that, during the last twenty-five years of his life, James produced writings at once enthralled by and wary of unfulfilled narrative potential, and attentive to how it might be used to bind epochs together.

The danger of viewing morality as provisional rather than permanent is explored in my fourth chapter, on The Wings of the Dove. I read the various promises in the novel as challenging rather than confirming J. L. Austin’s theory of the speech act. The promise is Austin’s most celebrated example of a statement that performs an action rather than offering a description. In The Wings of the Dove, however, description is itself an action, a means of shaping the world rather than merely reporting on it. As a result, the distinctive status of the promise dissolves, producing in James’s antihero Merton Densher a damaging crisis of faith.

Nicola Bradbury’s chapter on Henry James notices the force that comes from simple diction even as it expresses subtle, complicated thoughts, feelings and occasions in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and What Maisie Knew (1897). At times in these novels, a bold, clear style plays against the more verbose, analytical style we expect from late James. A style such as this repeatedly gestures towards an apprehension that is not fully expressed, something that goes behind and beyond the immediate statement. Here, style is measured at the level of the sentence and it is shown to comprise of a range of devices including alliteration, assonance, diction, syntax, rhythm, and cadence.