Abstract

While Henry James's journalists have long been taken as the author's protest against the invasion of privacy, this essay suggests that it is not the journalist who poses the greatest threat to privacy but rather the public itself. James's fiction addresses people's willingness to share their most intimate experiences during the journalistic interview in a way that ran counter to James's own preference for impersonal narration. A reading of James's The Reverberator suggests the interview may be a problem whose implications reach well beyond the limited interaction with the journalist to all conversation involving the selective disclosure of information with an unseen audience in mind.

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