Society, The Redeemed Form of Man (1879) was the last of James Senior's volumes to appear in print during his lifetime. Like many of his preceding efforts, the book is a series of letters addressed to an unnamed correspondent who, the author feels, is in need of spiritual guidance. The work is extensive yet unfocused, ranging across the whole spectrum of James Senior's intellectual and religious concerns, and includes the autobiographical mythologising of his vastation experience back in 1844. In the same year that Society was published, Henry James was preoccupied with the composition of his first major work, The Portrait of a Lady. The germ of the novel came to him as early as 1876: writing to William Dean Howells in October of that year he had mentioned that his new book ‘was to be an Americana – the adventures in Europe of a female Newman’, a reference to the hero of an earlier novel, The American, which Howells had started publishing in instalments in the Atlantic magazine four months previously (Letters, ii, 72). The gestation period for this new book was a lengthy one: two years later James was writing to his brother William that ‘the “great novel” you ask about is only begun’ (Letters, ii, 179); during 1879 he seems to have hit a creative impasse, confessing to Howells that the novel that he was ‘waiting to write, and which, begun sometime since’ was still only ‘an aching fragment’ (Letters, ii, 244); and writing to his father from Florence in 1880 he admits to ‘taking a holiday pure and simple – before settling down to the daily evolution of my “big” novel’ (Letters, ii, 277).