Chapter 1 examines the status of the transatlantic voyage in James’s writing, as a constant yet often absent event neglected by critics of the so-called international theme. Taking as a starting point the author’s description of the crossing – in his essay ‘Chester’ – as ‘an emphatic zero’, this chapter considers how the paradox contained in James’s phrase reflects the ontological insecurity of the nineteenth-century crossing itself: widely felt to resist record, but also scrutinized as an event of social and cultural importance. Such inconsistencies haunt James’s tale ‘The Patagonia’ – in which a passenger vanishes during a crossing from Boston to Liverpool – and The Ambassadors, in which the voyage is closely associated with the narrative impulse. As I argue, the ‘emphatic zero’ can be considered both as a Jamesian and as a maritime phenomenon, as the author dramatizes the peculiar effects of the voyage through affirming his interest in narrative omission and absence. Alongside detailed readings of the two named texts, I draw upon James’s letters, autobiographies, and essays on (other) sea-writers such as Pierre Loti, as well as contemporary guidebooks and newspapers, to demonstrate the author’s sensitivity to the material and psychological conditions of ocean travel.

Chapter 3 examines what it means to break a promise, and how doing so might be more virtuous than keeping it. Various promises are broken in The Ambassadors, although ironically their not being kept makes no difference, since what had been promised happens anyway. The chapter focuses on this odd paradox as a means of solving the central puzzle of the novel: Strether’s belief at the end of his summer in Paris that he has remained “just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been” (XXII, 284) while undergoing a profound transformation. As I see it, Strether’s developing sense of morality is a creative force, an act of the imagination.