Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/11

 PREFACE

, the second of the two novels which Henry James left unfinished, had been planned and begun some years before he died. The two first books and a part of the third had been written, and it appears that the idea had been abandoned for accidental reasons, not because he was himself dissatisfied with it. He went back to it again during the first winter of the war, having found that in the conditions he could not then go on with The Ivory Tower and hoping that he might be able to work upon a story of remote and phantasmal life. He re-dictated, with slight modifications, the chapters already written, and continued the book at intervals until the autumn of 1915. He was then engaged for a time on other work the introduction to the Letters from America of Rupert Brooke. He had just finished this and was preparing to return immediately to The Sense of the Past when on December 2 he was attacked by his last illness. The v