Although not precisely cognates, the extracts above, both of which take up the relationship between social conditions and literary achievement, suggest a possible point of convergence for black and white writers of late nineteenth-century American novels. That is, despite their generic differences, Henry James’s 1879 Hawthorne and Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, share the presumption that proper critical assessment of certain novels requires an analysis of the novelist’s or – in the case of Harper’s eponymous heroine – the would-be novelist’s social milieu. For these novels, according to James, ‘it is certain that a considerable observation of the society to which these productions were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for enjoying them’ (LC-1, 321). On this account the feedback loop between a novel and its society turns out to be an aesthetic loop; which is not quite to say that these novels, as aesthetic objects, are nothing without ‘a considerable observation’ of their contexts, but is at least to say that if we are, artistically, to get at what such texts are about, then we will have to engage them in relation to their various contexts.