The Lesson in ‘The Lesson of the Master’

Abstract

First published in 1888, ‘The Lesson of the Master’ is one of James’s most widely read stories about writers. The popularity of this comic tale is best attributed to the wide — and incorrect — assumption that the story is one of James’s most accessible fictions because it is so clearly autobiographical. Many readers have considered Henry St George a spokesman for James and his doctrine of renunciation a tenet of James’s own life. For these readers, St George speaks for James when he tells his young admirer, Paul Overt, that the intellectual and emotional disciplines of art require the writer-artist to reject such conventional relations as marriage.