Reading Order
The Ambassadors Reading Order
The Ambassadors (1903) by Henry James is the novel James himself considered his most technically perfect — the story of Lambert Strether, a middle-aged editor from Woollett, Massachusetts, sent to Paris by his prospective fiancée Mrs. Newsome to retrieve her son Chad from what she assumes is a corrupting entanglement with a French woman. What Strether finds instead is that Chad has been refined and improved by Europe, and that the Parisian world of Madame de Vionnet and the milieu she represents offers a vision of civilized life that Woollett has never imagined. The novel is James's most sustained meditation on the theme of living — 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to' — and the tragedy of those who arrive at this understanding too late.
Where to start
The Ambassadors (1903) — the complete novel; no prequel required
Complete The Ambassadors Book List
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The Ambassadors
Henry James·1903
The Ambassadors — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Ambassadors by Henry James about?
The Ambassadors is about Lambert Strether, a 55-year-old editor from Woollett, Massachusetts, who is sent to Paris by his prospective fiancée Mrs. Newsome to bring her son Chad home. Strether arrives expecting to find Chad corrupted by Europe and a dangerous French woman; instead he finds Chad polished, cultured, and attached to the charming Madame de Vionnet. Over the course of the novel, Strether becomes enchanted by Paris and by the kind of civilized, leisured European life that Woollett has never offered him — and discovers, too late, that he has spent his own life not quite living. The novel's famous central speech — Strether's exhortation to little Bilham to 'live all you can' — is both the novel's theme and its tragedy, since Strether himself has been too late to follow his own advice.
Is The Ambassadors by Henry James hard to read?
The Ambassadors is one of James's 'late phase' novels, written in his most elaborate and demanding style — long, syntactically complex sentences, a narrative that renders the finest gradations of social perception and psychological inference, and a narrative point of view so completely identified with Strether's consciousness that everything in the novel is filtered through his particular way of understanding (and misunderstanding) the world. Readers who find The Turn of the Screw, Washington Square, or The Portrait of a Lady accessible will find The Ambassadors a significant step up in difficulty. Those approaching James for the first time might start with Washington Square or The Europeans before attempting the late novels.
What is the significance of Strether's famous 'live' speech in The Ambassadors?
In the novel's most famous scene, Strether — overwhelmed by the beauty of Gloriani's Parisian garden and his growing sense of what he has missed in life — turns to little Bilham and urges him: 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?' The speech is both the novel's thesis and its irony: Strether articulates the lesson that Paris has been teaching him, but he articulates it as advice to someone else — and the novel's ending, in which Strether refuses to stay in Paris or to take anything for himself from his experience, shows that understanding the lesson does not mean being able to act on it.
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