Although biographical reconstruction of Henry James cannot underpin particular readings of sexuality in his fiction, it can make certain readings more convincing or plausible: how could a man whose sexual life was so invisible write so perceptively about sexuality? One popular answer, about which I am sceptical, is that writing became the place where James explored what he was afraid to explore in life.

James never married. Nor is it clear whether he ever had sex. In his own writing about himself (letters, notebooks, autobiographical writing) and in the writing of his contemporaries, there are no references to him being sexually active. This absence has meant that biographical accounts of James have given differing accounts of his sexual life, and none of these accounts can be regarded as conclusive. Yet all biographies of James have emphasized the importance of same-sex affection in his emotional life. One biographer of James, Sheldon Novick, claims that James had affairs with other men. The evidence on which Novick bases his claims is slight, however, and has been questioned by, among others, Leon Edel, James’s first major biographer, whose five-volume biography of James painted an influential picture of a repressed, sexually diffident and probably celibate ‘Master’. Writing about James (and this includes not only critical and biographical writing, but also the recent spate of fiction about James, novels including Colm Tóibín’s The Master and Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream) frequently associates him with loneliness and renunciation. He has acquired an almost mythological (in the Barthesian sense) status as the cautious, virginal and respectable queer, a necessary sad counterpoint to that exuberant, promiscuous and criminal homosexual, Oscar Wilde.