Sunspots and Blindspots in The Europeans

In July 1878, when the first number of The Europeans appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Henry James could hardly be said to be at the beginning of his career. Nor yet had he reached the middle of it. He was, let’s say, at the end of the beginning. It was at this juncture, I’ll argue — after the trials and occasional false starts of the early work, before the more firmly established commitments of the mature phase — that the representational cross-currents which played through his work as a who..