The Ambassadors

Lambert Strether has one job: cross the Atlantic, find Chad Newsome — the son of the woman he is soon to marry — and bring him home from Paris before whatever has kept him there any longer costs him the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts. Chad, when Strether finds him, is not at all what he expected: improved, in fact, in ways Strether can't account for, and unmistakably attached to a woman his mother back home has already decided is beneath consideration. The longer Strether stays to understand the situation properly, the less he trusts his own errand — and the more Paris itself starts to ask him a question he's spent his whole life avoiding, one he finally puts to a younger man in Gloriani's garden: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to."

James considered this his best-constructed novel. It was serialised through 1903 in The North American Review and published as a book that September in London (Methuen) and that November in New York (Harper & Brothers); this edition reproduces the text of the 1909 New York Edition, revised by James himself, with his own critical preface.

Bibliomancer restores the New York Edition text exactly as James wrote it.