All the works collected in the present volume underwent revision after their first appearances in print, with the exception of ‘The Papers’, which was published only in The Better Sort (1903). ‘The Birthplace’ also appeared in The Better Sort, without prior journal publication, and was subsequently revised for inclusion in the NYE of James's works. The eight other stories were first published in journals, and were reprinted in revised form either in the NYE (‘Fordham Castle’, ‘Julia Bride’, ‘The Jolly Corner’), or in the 1910 volume The Finer Grain (‘The Velvet Glove’, ‘Mora Montravers’, ‘A Round of Visits’, ‘Crapy Cornelia’ and ‘The Bench of Desolation’). For the most part, these printed versions of the stories constitute the only extant textual material. In only two cases is any further material available: a typescript of ‘The Jolly Corner’, with corrections in James's hand, which was used by Charles Scribner's Sons as setting-copy for the NYE; and the Harper and Brothers book edition of Julia Bride, issued as a single volume in 1909 and set from the copy used in Harpers’ Monthly Magazine, with a few small authorial revisions (see Introduction, p. LXIV). All substantive differences between the various versions of the texts are recorded in ‘Textual Variants’.

The copy texts used in this volume are the first book printings of the stories. In the case of The Better Sort, which contains ‘The Birthplace’ and ‘The Papers’, Methuen and Company in London and Charles Scribner's Sons in New York issued their editions on the same day (26 February 1903), but the Methuen version has been chosen as copy text here, as in James's letter to Pinker dated 13 November 1902 he writes of correcting Methuen's proofs and having them sent on to Scribner's Sons in that state; there is no extant correspondence to suggest that James subsequently or separately corrected the Scribner's Sons proofs as well (see Introduction, p. XLIII). With The Finer Grain, which was again published near-simultaneously by Scribner's Sons and by Methuen, on 6 October and 13 October 1910 respectively, the question of which edition to prioritize is rather more complex.