This book approaches a fundamental dilemma in James's late work: how to represent a fictional world in which characters struggle to crystallize a self and find a way to fulfill that self through expression and action in a world involving relationships with other characters, that is, in a world that, because it is social, is irreducibly and impossibly ethical.

The subject of the book is representation in the three major novels of the late phase of James's work: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. A chapter is also devoted to a discussion of The Tragic Muse written some ten years earlier, which shows James's schematic focus on this question at the middle stage of his career.

Landau claims that James reflects the experience implicit in the problem of representation, namely, the way representation generates further representation. The argument suggests that James's mode of accommodation to this problem is critical in any attempt to understand the increasing complexity of his fictional world in terms of plot and style, as well as the responses developed by the characters to their represented worlds.