The Sense of the Past (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)

by Henry James (1843-1916)

THE

SENSE OF THE PAST

HENRY JAMES

THE SENSE OF THE PAST

Annan Ph. sc.

Henry James

from a photograph by Alvin Landon Coburn kindly lent by Mr. J. B. Pinker

THE SENSE OF
THE PAST

BY

HENRY JAMES

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL

W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.

GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

COPYRIGHT

1917

PREFACE

The Sense of the Past, the second of the two novels which Henry James left unfinished, had been planned and begun some years before he died. The two first books and a part of the third had been written, and it appears that the idea had been abandoned for accidental reasons, not because he was himself dissatisfied with it. He went back to it again during the first winter of the war, having found that in the conditions he could not then go on with The Ivory Tower and hoping that he might be able to work upon a story of remote and phantasmal life. He re-dictated, with slight modifications, the chapters already written, and continued the book at intervals until the autumn of 1915. He was then engaged for a time on other work the introduction to the Letters from America of Rupert Brooke. He had just finished this and was preparing to return immediately to The Sense of the Past when on December 2 he was attacked by his last illness. The later chapters of the novel, as they stand, had not been finally revised by him; but it was never his habit to make more than verbal changes at that stage.

The notes on the course which the book was to follow were dictated when he reached the point where the original draft broke off. These notes are given in full; their part in Henry James's method of work is indicated in the preface to The Ivory Tower.

PERCY LUBBOCK.

CONTENTS

	PAGE
The Sense of the Past	1
Notes for The Sense of the Past	285