The ten stories collected in this volume are James's last. They were written between July 1902 and March 1909, a period notable for the composition of The Golden Bowl, the long trip to America in 1904–5 and the laborious revision of his earlier work for the New York Edition (hereafter NYE) – all of which adventures leave faint or decisive imprints on the stories. In keeping with the spirit of retrospection in this decade, some of the stories take the opportunity to revisit ideas James had treated elsewhere, but there is also much that is new: not just thematically, but by way of a harsher, more aggressive tone of address to the times he was living in, starker depictions of a vacuously narcissistic society, of financial or cultural poverty, of manipulations and betrayals of friendship or faithfulness so frequent as to seem almost routine. There is a good deal of comedy also, sometimes of a kind too acerbic to make for entirely comfortable reading, and much subtle, emotionally tangled exposure of the limitations as well as the rich sensitivities of James's now almost exclusively middle-aged heroes. Writing these stories cost him quantities of toil and frustration, as shall be seen, frustration so intense at times as to lead him, in the summer of 1909, to declare that he would never attempt another: ‘clearly I have written the last short story of my life’. True to his word, he appears not to have made any further moves in this direction, although his notebook of 1911 contains several lengthy sketches for possible tales, and the complexities of what he called ‘the K. B. case’ might have yielded others. Nonetheless, in his correspondence and in the Prefaces to the NYE he made warm comments on a number of these late stories and, for all the difficulties they brought in their wake, there is little doubt that he regarded them as worthy additions to the ‘multitude of pictures of my time’, the great array of ‘perfect short things […] fine, rare, strong, wise’, which from as far back as 1888 he had hoped would constitute his principal legacy.