"The Princess Casamassima was the fifth of James full-length novels, following Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and The Bostonians (1886). As readers of the time were quick to note, it was the first of James's novels that did not feature any American characters (with the partial exception of the title character herself ). It has often been coupled with The Bostonians and The Tragic Muse (1890) as representing a 'middle period', succeeded by James's years of engagement with the theatre and the beginning of a later phase in 1895 that culminates in The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)"--