'I had but hugged the shore' until Roderick Hudson, wrote Henry James. This is his first full-length novel and executed with such blazing, confident, thirty-one-year-old talent that even if he had produced nothing else, his fame would have been assured. Roderick Hudson, egotistical, beautiful and an exceptionally gifted sculptor, but poor, is taken from New England to Rome by Rowland Mallet, a rich man of fine appreciative sensibilities, who intends to give Roderick the scope to develop his genius. Together they seem like twins or lovers, opposing halves of what should have been an ideal whole. Roderick Hudson contains the obsessions that inspired all James's fiction but put across with a simple force and fire that he never quite caught again. 'Whatever the merits of "The Master" who wrote The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove,, and The Golden Bowl,' observes Geoffrey Moore, 'they are not those of the "young Harry" - for whom the writing of Roderick Hudson was such a pleasure, and a triumph.'

Companion in theme, period and setting to What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age is another of Henry James's studies of innocence exposed to corrupting influences. Nanda Brookenham is 'coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle that has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Light and ironic in its touch, The Awkward Age, nevertheless analyses the English character with great subtlety. The Awkward Age, which has been much praised for its natural dialogue and the delicacy of feeling it conveys, exemplifies Conrad's remark that James 'is never in deep gloom or in violent sunshine. But he feels deeply and vividly every delicate shade.'

In this study of irreducible ambiguity, a family quarrel unfolds when a woman and her son disagree on whom he should marry, and one of the potential brides will not make her true feelings known.

Henry James conceived the character of Hyacinth Robinson - his 'little presumptuous adventurer with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity' - while walking the streets of London. Brought up in poverty, Hyacinth has nevertheless developed aesthetic tastes that heighten his awareness of the sordid misery around him. He is drawn into the secret world of revolutionary politics and, in a moment of fervour, makes a vow that he will assassinate a major political figure. Soon after this he meets the beautiful Princess Casamassima. Captivated by her world of wealth and nobility, art and beauty, Hyacinth loses faith in radicalism, 'the beastly cause'. But tormented by his belief in honour, he must face an agonizing, and ultimately tragic, dilemma. The Princess Casamassima is one of James's most personal novels and yet one of the most socially engaged.