What Maisie Knew, with its unique blend of comedy, pathos and anguish, is a novel that is deeply concerned with ways of seeing the world. In choosing Maisie as his central consciousness, James has provided himself with maximum scope, precisely because he relies on a set of minimum conditions. For Maisie stands on the threshold of experience; she has not been drawn into the acceptance of conventional values, she lacks even the rudiments of a normal nursery education. Through her influence, James can gain a new purchase on reality, one which provides the bedrock for a shrewd philosophical investigation. The realms of perception and social intercourse are transformed, as he submits them to an open and original examination. To approach What Maisie Knew in this way is not to treat the novel merely as a vindication of innocence and a condemnation of corrupt personal relationships, as viewed from a traditional nineteenth-century perspective. As James himself notes in the preface, the creative approach to experience casts a fresh light even on the more lurid occupations of Beale and Ida Farange. Once the familiar preconceptions have been cast off, the revelation is complete; human events emerge in a sharp new focus. And it is these characteristics of What Maisie Knew which mark out its phenomenological orientation towards questioning and reconstituting established interpretative schemata.

The comfortable and uncritical relationship which most individuals establish with their surroundings – the one which What Maisie Knew endeavours to transform – is commonly described by phenomenologists as the natural or the naive attitude.