For Henry James, to read a novel was to rewrite it in his head, “re-handling the subject according to my own lights,” as he admitted to H. G. Wells—and this applied to his own work as much as to other people’s. Most of his novels were originally magazine serials, and he made changes when they appeared in book form. In preparing the New York Edition of his work, published between 1907 and 1909, he revised again, making thousands of alterations, especially to the earlier books (Philip Horne’s Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition of 1990 discusses this in detail). The edition was not a complete “collected”: for various reasons, James excluded The Europeans, Washington Square, and The Bostonians, along with almost half of his 105 short stories and nouvelles. Altogether, seventy separate works were reprinted in twenty-four volumes; two supplementary volumes, containing the unfinished The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, appeared posthumously in 1917.

As well as making these revisions, James wrote eighteen new prefaces for the New York Edition—some covering single novels, others covering groups of shorter works—with an average length of just under seven thousand words. He hoped that the prefaces would make the venture more attractive to subscribers, who had to commit to the whole edition in advance, receiving volumes two at a time, priced at $2 per standard volume, $4 for a superior binding, or $8 for a limited issue of numbered sets. (These