Recommendations
Books Like The Ambassadors
What to read after The Ambassadors by Henry James
Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903) is the novel James himself considered his finest — Lambert Strether's awakening in Paris, his discovery that he has been wrong about almost everything, and his decision, having understood too late, not to take what he now knows he wants. The most perfectly constructed of the late novels. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
The companion to The Ambassadors in the late major phase — published one year before The Ambassadors; where The Ambassadors is organized around a recognition (Strether's awakening to what Europe and life really are), The Wings of the Dove is organized around a scheme and its moral aftermath; James's most emotionally powerful late novel and the essential companion
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The Golden Bowl
by Henry James
Maggie Verver and the Prince — the third of the three great late novels; the most demanding and, for many readers, the one with the most satisfying architecture; Maggie's gradual recognition of what is happening and her decision about how to respond is the definitive exercise in the Jamesian central consciousness
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer in Europe — the best preceding James and the natural context for understanding the late novels; The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady are about the same fundamental situation (an American who enters the European world with wrong assumptions and pays a price) but the late style renders it in much greater psychological depth
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary, who cannot reconcile her idea of life with the life available to her in provincial France — James acknowledged Flaubert as the primary influence on his novelistic ambitions; Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors are, in some sense, about the same thing: the gap between the life one is capable of imagining and the life one actually has; Flaubert's Emma cannot bridge the gap; James's Strether understands the gap but refuses to try
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Newland Archer, who understands too late — the most directly Jamesian of Wharton's novels; where Strether makes his discovery in Paris and decides to act on it only negatively (refusing to take what he has understood), Newland Archer makes his discovery in New York and also refuses to act; both novels end with a man who chooses not to claim what he has realized he wants
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, who gave his life to professional dignity and sees too late what he sacrificed — the twentieth-century novel most directly about the same emotional subject as The Ambassadors; 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to' is the thesis of James's novel; The Remains of the Day is a study of a man who did not live all he could and has now, mostly, run out of time
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Washington Square
by Henry James
Catherine Sloper in 1840s New York — the most accessible James novel and the best starting point for readers who came to The Ambassadors first and want to understand the full arc of his work; short, direct, and establishing the Jamesian situation in its simplest form; the contrast with The Ambassadors shows how far James traveled as a stylist
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A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the 1920s — an unlikely companion but an illuminating one; where James's Strether discovers Paris as a world richer and more alive than anything he has come from, Hemingway describes Paris from the inside as the most alive place he ever experienced; reading James and Hemingway on Paris together shows two entirely different literary sensibilities responding to the same city
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