The Ambassadors (1903) begins James's new century. It did not come out until 1903, but he spent most of 1900 writing what he judged his best ‘all round’ work, the novel that seems closest to James himself, in its central character and its concern with solitude, renunciation, and two cultures. Unlike its successors, The Wings of the Dove, written in 1902, but published first, in 1902, and The Golden Bowl, written next and published in 1904, it is not a love-story. It is a Bildungsroman with a hero of middle age, Lambert Strether, the first and most important of the novel's ambassadors. Most of them, though not all, cross the Atlantic to convert the young Chad Newsome to the materialist and puritanical culture of New England. Like the ghost on the jolly corner, and most of James's key symbols, the idea of an ambassador is picked up from the surface of the novel, in casual references to ambassadors being the sort of people you might meet at Gloriani's reception.

Strether is one of James's most lovable characters, and perhaps the one most capable of loving, though we do not see him in love. It is arguable that in this novel nobody loves, with the possible exception of Madame de Vionnet, one of James's enigmatic characters. The international theme is conspicuous, containing a preoccupation begun in the first stories, then powerfully developed in Roderick Hudson and many of its successors. In The Ambassadors the contrast between Europeans and Americans is the vehicle for a scrutiny of the determined self. It anticipates the subject of ‘The Jolly Corner’ but is far from being a fable, adapting the classic Bildungsroman, the novel of maturation and growth, to tell one of fiction's most sustained and elaborated stories of the making of moral and affective life. It is about imagination, and a reflexive narrative.

Technically, it continues James's continued experiment with point of view, keeping close to a central consciousness, and restricting narrative voice to a small though important space between character and reader. The inventor of this minimal narrative was Jane Austen, the English novelist with whom James had most in common, whose genius he belittled in his lecture, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, in patronizing figures of thrush and needlework.