Opinions about  The ivory tower seem generally favourable and on the whole I concur with the majority view, but a better reason for getting to know what remains of this project is that we have access to an unusually wide selection of James’s preliminary work. This is partly because, when he laid aside the completed three books and one chapter in August 1914, on the outbreak of the European War, he fully intended to complete all the planned ten books of the novel when circumstances were more conducive to working on contemporary material. Thus he kept his extensive working note (the only other example of these which survives is the one for The ambassadors, a copy of which he used when seeking a publisher for that novel). Another reason for the plethora of documentation is that The ivory tower grew out of a rather different idea for a novel, initially referred to by James in his notebooks as the ‘K.B. case’ from its development out of the situation of his friend Katherine Bronson, and later worked out in brief as Mrs Max. I will try to present as much of this material as possible here, arranged in a usable sequence.

If you are new to this work you have, as I see it, a choice in how to approach the agglomeration of original material which may be seen to comprise The ivory tower – you may either read the extant text of the novel without preconceptions and then tackle the notebook entries for background and the working statement for a sense of closure (as it indicates how the broad outline of the plot might have fitted into the ten books); or you may take all the material in chronological order, which will perhaps give you the best sense of how James’s ideas developed over time and how close, or how distant, the ‘completed’ chapters of the novel approach to what he at first intended (for the ‘ivory tower’ idea when it ‘jelled’).

If you want to start reading the text as written you can go straight to the start of the novel. Alternatively you should start with the notebook entries for the idea which later developed into The ivory tower; at the foot of each notes’ page you will find a link to the next page in their chronological sequence.