The Ambassadors, Volume 22

The Ambassadors is a novel by Henry James, first serialised in the North American Review in 1903 and published in book form the same year. The volume 22 designation refers to its place in James’s collected New York Edition, where he gathered the major work and wrote new prefaces for each book. It is one of the three great novels of his late period along with The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, and is generally considered the most accessible of the three.

Lambert Strether is a middle aged American from Woollett, Massachusetts, sent to Europe by his wealthy widowed friend Mrs Newsome on a mission. Mrs Newsome’s son Chad has been living in Paris for several years and has not come home as he was supposed to. Strether is to find Chad and persuade him to return to Woollett and to the family manufacturing business. The mission appears straightforward and Strether arrives in Paris with no doubt about what he must do. The novel is what happens to that certainty over the course of a long Parisian spring and summer.

What Strether discovers is that Chad has changed for the better in ways that Woollett cannot recognise. The Paris that has formed him is not the corrupting city Mrs Newsome imagines but is something more subtle and more valuable. The woman with whom Chad has formed an attachment, Madame de Vionnet, is not the simple seductress that Woollett would have predicted. Strether’s mission slowly inverts itself. The famous scene in the Gloriani garden, where Strether tells a young man to live all he can because it is a mistake not to, is one of the central passages of the late James and gives the novel its emotional climate.

The novel runs about five hundred pages and demands the patience that late James always demands. The sentences extend across paragraphs. The narrative voice constantly qualifies itself. For readers willing to give it the time, the reward is one of the great novels in English. It pairs naturally with The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, the two other novels that complete the late period trilogy.