‘The patient, passionate little cahier’: French in Henry James’s Notebooks

This chapter is based specifically on the surviving notebooks in which Henry James recorded ideas for stories, and gave vent to his feelings about his art. There are six of these notebooks, covering the years 1878 to 1911. Pages of the notebooks on which French does not occur are the exception. This chapter asks how we might ‘read’ the use of French in this specific textual environment. It answers that question by comparing the notebooks with examples of James’s use of French in published fiction and in letters. In the notebooks, there is no addressee, or rather the writer is his own recipient. The chapter looks especially at passages where James reflects on his own practice as a writer; it identifies a cluster of key French words, all of them associated by James with the work of imagination and the craft of fiction.