My slightly frivolous chapter title takes us straight to Henry James, of course, and the joke is meant to indicate, among other things, that I recognize how obvious a move this is, once we have started on the question of literature and knowledge. It was James who wrote so eloquently, in relation to the publication of Flaubert's letters, of ‘the insurmountable desire to know’, and who thought, in that context, that ‘some day or other we shall surely agree that … we pay more for some kinds of knowledge than those particular kinds are worth’. But to read these words, and to think of the knowledge at issue – the fact, as James says, ‘that the author of calm, firm masterpieces … was narrow and noisy’ – is to remember how many kinds of knowledge there are, how much work the words know and knowledge are so often asked to do, and how varied that work is.

If we read the actual sentence I have massacred for my title, for instance, at the point in the novel from which James takes his phrase, we come upon another kind of knowledge entirely: not the goal of curiosity but the fruit of experience. In his preface to What Maisie Knew, James writes of the appeal for the novelist of a child's ‘confused and obscure notation’ of a tangle of adult relations, namely the goings on of her divorced parents and their changing companions, and adds that it was important for him that Maisie should see more than she understood.