ABSTRACT
This chapter conveys the reason Henry James took such delight in it in 1907. It traces the developing consciousness, brilliantly intertwining the movement itself with the growth in understanding which that movement brings about. It was the psychologist William James, Henry's brother, who first used the phrase the 'stream of consciousness' - destined to be taken up by twentieth-century novelists to describe what they saw as a new literary technique of psychological realism but Henry James had long before arrived at the view that it was indeed the movement of consciousness that should provide the essential form and content of the art of fiction. The portrait of Isabel Archer that James draws in the early sections of the novel is that of a young American girl, appealingly frank and vivacious, but with quite a high opinion of her own worth. James as artist cannot afford to dispense with either element of the international metaphor.
