Master Narratives

This essay is an account of the extraordinary recent outpouring of biographical fiction about James. Taking David Lodge's essay on 'The Year of Henry James' as its starting point, this essay contrasts Lodge's Author, Author with Colm Tóibín's The Master. It considers the preceding biographical work that informed this fiction. It discusses the paradox whereby an author so wary of biographical intrusion has proved so attractive to biographers and biographical novelists, and considers the ways in which the novels face up to the difficulties of writing about such a mannered stylist and supreme renderer of consciousness.