Disappearing Authors and Resentful Readers in Late-Nineteenth Century American Fiction: The Case of Henry James

In the nineteenth century the storytelling" I" in fiction was emphati-cally associated with the figure of the novelist, a human being who seemed to become accessible to the reader through the process of reading. Between the 1880's and the turn-of-the-century, however, several changes occurred in widely-held assumptions about the pleasures of fiction-reading and the grounds of connection between writer and reader. Like the contact between doctor and patient, manufacturer and customer, novelist and editor (and many others), the relationship between reader and author was transformed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by a sense of growing distance and impersonality. The common belief that fiction fosters an imaginatively rich and even personal relationship between writer and reader was progressively eroded in the final decades of the century.