The anecdote, which focuses on one character and one incident, is a brief, compact, and highly distilled story comparable to a sonnet. James called his short fiction “tales,” and he divided his tales into types. He began writing stories ten years before he published his first novel, and over his lifetime, his stories appeared in thirty-five different periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. For half a century, James employed himself in the writing of 112 pieces of short fiction, beginning with “A Tragedy of Error” in 1864 and ending with “The Round of Visits” in 1910. Several times in his life he expressed the desire to give up writing novels and to devote himself solely to creating short fiction. James has not been given the same recognition for his short fiction that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe have received yet James devoted much of his literary life to the creation of short fiction and made many attempts to master the form. His stories can be divided into three categories: international romances, tales about writers and artists, and introspective narratives about wasted lives. Even though he focuses on the death of women and children, he avoids both the macabre and the sentimental. Death and dying are also a part of James’s stories. Marriage is often rejected by his characters, and when it does appear, it is often the scene of heartaches and hidden resentments. Romance is frequently at the center of James’s tales, but his lovers have difficulty coming to terms with their own feelings, and often love goes unrecognized and unfulfilled. James’s narrators are often confused individuals trying to puzzle out and evaluate themselves and the people around them.
The characters do not engage in dramatic actions but spend much of their time in cryptic conversations, which slowly reveal the intense psychological strain under which they are laboring.
James’s stories are about members of high society. Henry James (15 April 1843 –28 February 1916) believed that an author must be granted his donnée, or central idea, and then be judged on the execution of his material.
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