Henry James turned fifty-seven in April 1900, and the new century saw the start of his ‘major phase’ of writing, which brought The Ambassadors, TheWings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl to completion within four years. James had recently moved from London to Rye in Sussex, and in 1899 bought the freehold of Lamb House, his first ‘home’, which he called ‘a haven of rest out of which I pray heaven I may never shift for all the rest of my days’. The seclusion of small-town life was varied by visits from family, friends and literary neighbours. During 1900 Stephen Crane lived 8 miles away; Joseph Conrad was at nearby Winchelsea, working with Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford); James also saw H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling (HJL 4:179). English and American friends, new and old, from Edmund Gosse and Mrs Humphry Ward to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Edith Wharton, came to visit himin Rye. Amongst James's intimates, relationships grew with the young American sculptor Hendrik C. Andersen and a charming Irishman, Jocelyn Persse.

On a professional front, with the expense of the Lamb House freehold to cover, by 7 May 1898 James had signed up with the literary agent James Brand Pinker (1863–1922), whose client list would include Crane, Conrad, Wells and Hueffer, as well as George Gissing, Arnold Bennett and (briefly) D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. James was more productive than ever: he wrote to his brother William in America on 20 April 1898: ‘this year, & next, thank heaven, my income will have been much larger than for any year of my existence’; and to William's wife Alice on 1 October 1900: ‘the excellently effective Pinker is bringing me up, and round, so promisingly that it really contains the germs of a New Career’. In August 1904, with the three ‘major phase’ novels completed, he left for an eleven-month American tour – his first visit to his homeland for twenty-one years. On his return he began to plan the New York Edition (hereafter NYE) of his writings, which was published between 1907 and 1909 in twenty-four volumes, and intended to consolidate his literary achievement.