The Figure in the Carpet

The Figure in the Carpet follows an unnamed young critic who is told by the famous novelist Hugh Vereker, almost in passing, that every one of his books contains a single hidden design — "the string the pearls are strung on" — that no critic has ever noticed, let alone named. The critic's hunt for that hidden meaning consumes him and draws in two other people who each claim, at different points, to have finally found it, while the reader is left exactly where the narrator is: certain something is there, and never quite shown what it is.

Henry James published the novella in 1896, widely read since as a sly, self-aware joke about literary criticism itself — about whether a work's "meaning" is something an author actually plants for a reader to dig out, or something critics simply insist must be there.

Bibliomancer publishes the 1896 text exactly as Henry James wrote it.