From the vantage point of What Maisie Knew and ‘The Turn of the Screw’, both fictions centred in childhood, the adulthood lying beyond the marker of initiation into sexual knowledge looks like treacherous country. In The Awkward Age (1899), centred in adolescence, James makes some tentative explorations into that country on the far side of the marker, and finds out that after all it has firm ground and breathable air. It is a more forgiving fiction than its two predecessors: at least, it is not tensed around that same recoil from the sexual and mistrust of the adult which animates Maisie and ‘The Turn of the Screw’. Even from inside the sordid tangle of impropriety and treachery of The Awkward Age, James finds it may be possible, after all, to talk; there may be language, and even candour, beyond the breakdown of the old law, and the old story; there may be ways of talking about taboo rather than simply inhabiting a language (as in Maisie and ‘The Turn of the Screw’) broken over it. It may be possible to imagine adults who can hold apart ‘knowing’ and ‘condemning’.