The Ambassadors
An elderly American is sent to Paris to bring back a young man who has apparently been detained by a woman, and discovers that he prefers the young man's life to his own. James called it his best novel, and it is certainly his most controlled study of someone learning too late what he wanted.
Almost everything happens in conversation, and the conversations are full of people not saying what they mean. Strether's famous advice to live while you can is delivered by a man who has not. The novel's method is to make the reader infer, from a glance or a pause, what the characters cannot admit.
Public-domain status
First published in 1903. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Henry James died in 1916, so this work has been free to republish there since 1987.
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Keep reading
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- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Paris — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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