Two unfinished novels represent an extraordinary might-havebeen. For The Sense of the Past we have nearly three hundred short pages, of the New York Edition, with another seventy pages of James's ruminative scenario for the completed novel. He began writing it early in 1900. Leon Edel refers its origin to a railway journey with Kipling's publisher F. N. Doubleday after lunch with the Kiplings, and their discussion of another volume of ghost stories. James ‘seemed to see, as the train sped him back to London, “the picture of three or four ‘scared’ and slightly modern American figures”, against European backgrounds … “hurried by their fate … in search of, in flight from, something or other … a quasi-grotesque Europeo-American situation” ‘ (Life, ii. 343–4). Out of this came the scenario for Ralph Pendrel's story, with the title The Sense of the Past. He started this in January, continued in the summer, then laid it aside to work on Strether's search and flight, also for something and from something. He tried again in 1914, continuing the narrative from the chapter in which Ralph tells his time-travel story to the American Ambassador and enters his house and the past, went on for 180 pages, then dictated the scenario, with its development and ending. Edel guesses at problems with the ambitious time-travelling fantasy, and dissatisfaction because of the war, but Percy Lubbock's note to the New York Edition tells us that James went back to the novel after difficulties with The Ivory Tower, interrupted it to write his introduction to Rupert Brooke's Letters from America, and was about to resume when he had the first stroke in December 1915. The subject was difficult and ambitious, and James had no use for the historical novel because he knew it was impossible to reproduce past language, but there seems no reason to suppose that he would not have finished it, in view of the full scenario in which problems are articulated and solved as he projects narrative and analyses projection, quoting ‘solvitur ambulando’. We have a novel which is about one-third written, with about two-thirds in the form of speculative, problem-solving summary and discussion – a wonderfully mixed and readable discourse which blends with the formal part of the novel because it is narrative as well as analytic and because the novel is reflexive.