Included here are two sample letters, presented in “clear text” format and embellished from the print edition with new annotations and links to supplementary documents. These are intended to give the reader a better sense of the useful potential inherent in a digital platform for Henry James Letters.

All available evidence suggests that Henry James wrote letters spontaneously and rapidly—sometimes composing three or four in a single day’s sitting—so it is not surprising to find that many documents in the archive betray signs of haste: running script crammed into margins, occasional letters dropped from polysyllabic words, and other slips of the pen. Like its print forbear, Henry James Letters deliberately retains the resulting oddities and inconsistencies of punctuation and spelling (examples of which will be found in the letters presented here). Since these irregularities are characteristic of the author, the letters gain nothing by altering them.