ABSTRACT
The Other House, Henry James's second novel after Summersoft, describes a heroine, Rose Armiger, whose main psychological trait is a monomaniacal passion for the excessively superficial Tony Bream. There are techniques adopted from the stage that worked so well within the novel medium that they remained in James's fiction. James in paying a theatrical attention to the visually telling aspects of his medium, in considering his readership's visual imagination, obeys a late nineteenth-century stage convention. He searched for ways to set limits in terms of time and magnitude so that the painting's coherent sense of scale would pervade the novel. In studying contemporary playwrights James was looking for the way that the stage provided limits within which it set its own particular scale. James's belief was that the 'questions that are of the essence of drama' would be asked by his audience if limits consonant with the form expressing that drama were set correctly.
