Pandora's Box: the family correspondence in Notes of a Son and Brother

In Notes of a Son and Brother, James attempted to remedy the imaginative extravagances of A Small Boy and Others and the use he made of his family's correspondence suggests that he regarded these letters as literary artefacts similar to those he included in his fiction. Argues that his purpose was not to conceal the past but to reforge it in full view of the disparity between fact and desire. In revising his family correspondence, especially that of his brother William, bringing it into accordance with his own text, he was accomplishing between them what life could not: an agreement, in the largest terms, in style.