In the first of his three great last novels, The Ambassadors, James returned to material that he had first used in a curious experimental novel written as a companion-piece to What Maisie Knew. The plot of The Awkward Age hinges on the return to the metropolis of an elderly man after thirty years of nursing a broken heart in the country and his being caught up, through the power of old associations, into a society of corrupt beautiful people. At the centre of that society is Mrs Brookenham, a devious enchantress, still, ‘in her forty-first year’, deceptively pretty:

It is Mrs Brookenham's daughter Nanda, at eighteen the image of her dead grandmother, the beautiful Lady Julia he had long ago loved and lost, who attracts Mr Longdon's interest. Poor Nanda, guileless and innocent and far too young for her age, has all the same been tainted by the scandalous adult conversation which, banished far past the proper age to the schoolroom, she has in theory been protected from hearing. The devastating effect of this contamination on the poor girl's marriage prospects is compounded by her choosing to fall hopelessly in love with the man that her quietly rapacious mother also wants for herself.