‘To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal’. By reflecting on the act of reflection, this statement at the beginning of chapter eight of A Small Boy and Others encapsulates the nature of Henry James's autobiographical writing. The ‘apparitional’ past suggests the indistinct distance between old age and youth as well as the fantastical quality of memory. James's statement characteristically indicates his awareness of the thematic and stylistic issues in the interweaving of fact and fiction, memory and imagination inherent in life writing. In his volumes of autobiography, James consciously constructs the encounter between his youthful self and the aging writer he has become, using all the narrative skill of his long experience. Not only do we find the author's own past spliced with the writing present, in his retrospection old Europe confronts young America, and two diverse traditions and generations are interwoven. Consequently, the diversity of James's writing career frames the story of his childhood and youth, indicating to the careful reader the extent to which the one shaped the other.

A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother trace the development of the young James's imagination from early childhood, focusing in the first volume on his significantly haphazard education, and in the second on familial and personal interactions during his teenage years. The perspective from which the memories are experienced is at once that of the small boy or youth and the mature artist: a continuous self, complexly both subjective and objective. Chapter three of A Small Boy opens on a note that is typical of James's tone in both volumes: ‘But I positively dawdle and gape here – I catch myself in the act; so that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that mystification of the summer school’. The mature author is observing his childhood self as he in turn observes the world. The author's ‘dawdling and gaping’ echoes that of the small boy, but by asserting his awareness of this fact, by catching himself in the act, he takes control of the narrative.