Appendix A - Project of Novel by Henry James

Summary

I am indebted to the Morgan Library for permission to provide here a transcript of the ‘Project of Novel by Henry James’ (see Introduction pp. XXXIX–XL, XLII–LIII and LV–LVI). The correction of errors has been kept to a minimum and indicated in square brackets; the presentation of dashes and inverted commas has been regularized.

It occurs to me that it may conduce to interest to begin with a mention of the comparatively small matter that gave me, in this case, the germ of my subject—as it is very often comparatively small matters that do this; and as, at any rate, the little incident in question formed, for my convenience, my starting-point, on my first sketching the whole idea for myself.

A friend (of perceptions almost as profound as my own!) had spoken to me, then—and really not measuring how much it would strike me or I should see in it—something that had come under his observation at short time before, in Paris. He had found himself, one Sunday afternoon, with various other people, in the charming old garden attached to the house of a friend (also a friend of mine) in a particularly old-fashioned and pleasantly quiet part of the town; a garden that, with two or three others of the same sort near it, I myself knew, so that I could easily focus the setting. The old houses of the Faubourg St.-Germain close round their gardens and shut them in, so that you don't see them from the street—only overlook them from all sorts of picturesque excrescences in the rear. I had a marked recollection of one of these wondrous concealed corners in especial, which was contiguous to the one mentioned by my friend: I used to know, many years ago, an ancient lady, long since dead, who lived in the house to which it belonged and whom, also on Sunday afternoons, I used to go to see. On one side of that one was another, visible from my old lady's windows, which was attached to a great convent of which I have forgotten the name, and which I think was one of the places of training for young missionary priests, whom we used to look down on as they strolled, always with a book in hand, in the straight alleys.