Before discussing the emergence of the modernist drama of skeptical reading in the work of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, it will be useful to have an overview of the figure of the reader in the work of Henry James. James’s aesthetic and especially his poetics as delineated in his essays and prefaces articulate distinctive and typical modernist positions, and his writers and readers generally tend to match up rather snugly with the concepts of the implied author and the implied reader that would animate critical theory: his story “The Private Life” (1892) is an excellent illustration of the idea of the implied author avant la lettre; concerning the implied reader, James noted, “the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters” (Theory 321). James of course was deeply interested by the figure of the writer, the nature of literary fiction, and the roles of the unwritten and the unread; he was also concerned with the functions both of reading and of the failure to read. For an author with such interests, however, his depictions of the effects of reading are fairly vague; he rarely depicts the act of reading. Often, we are informed of the public status or genuine value of novels or other writings by fictional authors, but are provided with little concrete description of the precise nature of such works.