‘The wondrous figure of that genius had long haunted me, and circumstances into which I needn’t here enter had within a few years contributed much to making it vivid … More interesting still than the man – for the dramatist at any rate – is the S.T. Coleridge type; so what I was to do was merely to recognise the type, to borrow it, to re-embody and freshly place it; an ideal under the law of which I could but cultivate a free hand. I proceeded to do so; I reconstructed the scene and the figures – I had my own idea, which required, to express itself, a new set of relations – though, when all is said, it had assuredly taken the recorded, transmitted person, the image embalmed in literary history, to fertilise my fancy … Therefore let us have here as little as possible about its “being” Mr This or Mrs That. If it adjusts itself with the least truth to its new life it can’t possibly be either …’

 

– HENRY JAMES; from his preface to The Lesson of the Master and Other Tales.