The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors is a novel by the American writer Henry James, first published as a serial in the North American Review and in book form in 1903 by Methuen.

Lambert Strether travels to Paris at the request of Mrs Newsome, the widowed woman he expects to marry, in order to recover her son Chad and take him back to Massachusetts to make gloves and money. Chad, however, has been living in Paris among people Strether had been told to distrust, among them Madame de Vionnet, a woman of rank whose influence over the young man is the reason for the errand. The novel is written in the third person from Strether's point of view, and the reader learns what is going on at the same speed as he does, including how far his instructions have begun to look less like common sense than like provincial fear. James called the book a comedy, and much of it turns on what Strether finally decides to do with what he has understood.

James had lived in Europe for decades and wrote the novel in his late period, when his sentences had become long and qualified and his interest had moved from events to the way people gauge one another's motives.