In chapter 4 of The Ambassadors, following a scene that few who have read could ever forget,Strether’s dinner with Maria Gostrey, “whose dress was ‘cut down,’ . . . in respect to shoulders and bosom,” “face to face over a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-colored shades,” and after attending a play in London, Strether outlines the nature of his journey to Paris to Miss Gostrey, who asks whether Mamie Pocock is Chad Newsome’s “own niece.” Strether tries to clarify: 

“Oh, you must yourself find a name for the relation. His brother-in-law’s sister. Mrs. Jim’s sister-in-law.”

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. “And who in the world’s Mrs. Jim?”

“Chad’s sister—who was Sarah Newsome. She’s married—didn’t I mention it?—to Jim Pocock.”

“Ah yes,” she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things—! Then, however, with all the sound it could have, “Who in the world’s Jim Pocock?” she asked.

“Why, Sally’s husband. That’s the only way we distinguish people at Woollett,” he good-humouredly explained.

“And is it a great distinction—being Sally’s husband?”

He considered. “I think there can be a scarcely greater—unless it may become one, in the future, to be Chad’s wife.”

“Then how do they distinguish you?”

“They don’t—except, as I’ve told you, by the green cover.”

 At this point in the novel and for some time after, families make a difference in The Ambassadors, as they do in most of James’s novels, at least.

It’s been about thirty-five years since the spring 1989 issue of the Henry James Review (10.2) brought together articles mostly on or including Henry James’s family, intimate person-to-person matters that relate to and are included in James’s fiction, and quasi-family relations in James’s life and fiction. About two years after that 1989 issue of the HJR, R. W. B. Lewis’s The Jameses: A Family Narrative was published(1991). Three years later Alfred Habegger published The Father (1994) and the next year we were able to read Carol Holly’s Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (1995). Since 1995 scholarship on family and families has not been absent from Henry James studies (e.g., Paul Fisher’s The House of Wits [2013] and a number of recent pieces by Mary M. Burke on James and his Irish ancestry), but neither has it been an emphasis.

 Thus the Henry James Review invites essays between 1,000 and 12,500 words on any aspect of “Henry James and Family.” Contributors might choose to engage the topic, for example, through James’s biographical family (immediate and/or distant); archival collections that bring new attention to Henry James’s family or family-like relations in James’s fiction; new conceptions of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century family that would cast light on James’s biography and/or fiction; intimate groups in Henry James’s life or fiction that organize as families, family members, or quasi families; the language of family life as an element of James’s style, etc.

Send submissions to hjamesr@creighton.edu by March 1, 2026. Please include “James and Family Special Issue” in the subject line.