The Sacred Fount was conceived as a short story, then published as a novel in 1901. Its action takes place over one weekend, on the train and in a country house, keeping the unity of time and place James uses with economy and force in his shorter fiction. It has the unusual feature of a first-person narrator, avoided in James's novels, as it was by George Eliot and Hardy. It is essential to this teasing story, because it lets James keep secrets in a way impossible for his usual narrator, who looks over his characters’ shoulders and goes behind their backs. This narrator wants to look and go behind, and is not allowed to. It is a story which made Henry Adams say that Harry James should go to a ‘cheery asylum’ and irritated Edmund Wilson by its mystification. Several reviewers agreed that it was a departure from sanity, though they were also unsympathetic to James at his most accessible.

More riddling than the first-person narrative of The Turn of the Screw, it mingles comedy and poetry to create the nameless narrator's ambiguity. The reader never knows quite how to read him or his detective enterprise. Like James's best reflexive tale ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, it is a test and a tease, forcing us to admit hermeneutic defeat. We end not by knowing, as we expect in Victorian stories or modern whodunits, but by not knowing. It is an epistemological fable with a twist of unresolved mystification, a pre-parody of the three great late novels, with their symbolic stories of clandestine sex.

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ is a joke about curious critics. The Sacred Fount is a joke about curious readers who go to novels and gossip for salacious pleasure. The joke is licensed because it is also made at the expense of the complicit and curious author. James was a gossip, a kind man capable of spite and malice. Famous for not wanting to hear too much of those dinner-table anecdotes about a son fighting his mother over valuable furniture and objets d'art, and an Italianate American father with a little ‘moulded daughter’ and a ‘massive’ Tuscan villa, he exercised listening restraint only in the interests of stimulus and invention. His nameless narrator is like him in loving gossip, unlike him in not knowing where to stop.