Henry James saw fiction itself as a house. “The house of fiction,” he wrote, “has in short not one window, but a million.” There is a peculiar intensity in how he described the New York houses that he knew as a child in his memoir of his first 14 years, A Small Boy and Others, written in 1911, when James was 68. “I have lost nothing of what I saw,” he wrote, “and… though I can’t now quite divide the total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for me.”

It was as though old New York, as he experienced it between the ages of five and 12, had remained still and frozen and perfect in his memory. It was the ground which formed him; he was never to have a place again which would belong to him so fundamentally.

He would not, in fact, possess another house until, when, aged 54, he signed the lease on Lamb House in Rye in England. The year before he purchased the lease he wrote his novel The Spoils of Poynton, a drama about owning and losing a treasured house. Having signed the lease, he wrote The Turn of the Screw about a lone figure attempting to make a home in a house already possessed.

New York, once James began to travel in Europe, became the site of his dreams. One of this site’s most hallowed quarters was Number 58 West 14th Street, first seen during “an afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue. It was ‘our’ house, just acquired by us… the place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of anchorage of the spirit.”

James’s other anchor was his maternal grandmother’s house in Washington Square. This was the house he gave to Dr Sloper and his daughter Catherine in the novel, Washington Square, that he began to serialize in 1879. A year later, in The Portrait of a Lady, he would allow his heroine Isabel Archer to live in his other grandmother’s house in Albany in upstate New York.

In Chapter Two of Washington Square, James inserted a passage about the square and its environs which strikes the reader as strange, almost clumsy:

“It was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursemaid with unequal step… It was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observation and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.”

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James was prepared to disrupt the sacred seamlessness of his fiction to evoke this square as belonging to his memory, his primary sense of himself which could be brought back now only in words. He was claiming Washington Square for himself as much as for his fiction.

What he was doing also was registering the complexity of change. The house in memory, the house that has been demolished or erased, was not merely a vehicle for soft recall, easy nostalgia. Using an old house in a novel, naming it even, taking back what had been lost, was, for him, a process whereby rooms, once familiar, once full, become alive or almost so. These rooms were handed to characters who had themselves come to claim them.

Henry James’s New York, the city of his childhood, “the small warm dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century”, was situated between Fifth and Sixth Avenues down to Washington Square, and up eastwards to Union Square, which was, in his day, surrounded by a high railing. Close by were members of James’s extended family, including his mother’s cousin Helen. “I see in her strong simplicity,” he wrote, “that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs.” James saw that “her goodness somehow testifies for the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies”.

As James grew older, he was allowed to wander farther. He and his brother ventured up and down Broadway “like perfect little men of the world; we must have been let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming… Broadway must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden.”

Towards the end of the 1870s, when Henry James published his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which he set out the limits of America as a place where serious novels could be written, he was attacked by critics in both New York and Boston (“the clucking of a brood of prairie hens,” he called them), including his friend William Dean Howells, who wrote: “We foresee, without any powerful prophetic lens, that Mr James will be in some quarters promptly attainted of high treason.”

James was unrepentant in a letter he wrote to Howells. In that same letter James mentioned a forthcoming serialization in The Cornhill Magazine of “a poorish story in three numbers — a tale purely American, the writing of which made me feel acutely the want of the ‘paraphernalia’”.

The “poorish story” was Washington Square. And the paraphernalia in question were, James had written earlier in the letter, the “manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured and established that a novelist lives — they are the very stuff his work is made of”.

While it is clear that James was being modest when he mentioned the book to Howells (and his general tendency in referring to his own work was to be self-deprecating), he was, in fact, underestimating a book that is certainly his best short novel. James’s portrait of the vulnerable and sensitive and unassertive Catherine Sloper is one of the most sustained and convincing of his career. The novel was the first of his books to be serialized simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

The value of Washington Square also lies in the lack of “paraphernalia”, the lack of a social and political hinterland in the narrative, thus forcing James to intensify the psychology, to draw the father and daughter with greater subtlety and care because he, at the apex of his social power in London at the time of writing, did not know enough about the city and the society in which he had set the novel. However, he knew about the interior of the houses where he had been a small boy. Even though his knowledge of the wider context was patchy, he could concentrate on familiar rooms.

He placed the events of Washington Square in the very years when he and his family had lived in the city. The original story was told to him by the actress Fanny Kemble whose brother had jilted an heiress when he discovered that her father intended to disinherit her. James moved this story to his own lost territory, to the site which belonged not merely to his memories, and not only to the Old New York whose contours he knew from childhood, but to a very particular house he could now re-build and re-people for his novel.

Thirty years later, James would also re-build another set of New York rooms for his story The Jolly Corner, his last great piece of fiction. He would allow these rooms to haunt his protagonist Spencer Brydon, who has returned to New York after many years in Europe. Brydon begins to prowl at night in the New York apartment that he has kept empty all the years. Slowly, he realizes that his double, his alter ego, the part of him that has remained at home, is also to be found in these old rooms at night. He too is prowling. As the two men do battle, the ghost overpowers the visitor with “a rage of personality before which his own collapsed”. The apartment in The Jolly Corner is where Spencer “had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died”. The scarce light in these interior spaces, the grey light, the crepuscular light, are essential elements in the atmosphere that becomes increasingly ominous and uncanny.

It seems as though Brydon is haunting his own house, or that the atmosphere is so filled with echoes of the dead that he experiences its density as a kind of eeriness. He feels “in his hand… the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead.”

In Washington Square, James used echoes of the past to animate the lives of the next generation who were all too ready to eschew social history for the blight, as James saw it, of newness. Dr Sloper’s niece Marian, for example, is about to marry a young man called Arthur Townsend, who speaks in the novel about his new house: “It’s only for three or four years. At the end of three or four years we’ll move. That’s the way to live in New York — to move every three or four years. Then you always get the last thing. It’s because the city is growing so quick — you’ve got to keep up with it. It’s going straight up town — that’s where New York’s going… I guess we’ll move up little by little; when we get tired of one street we’ll go higher. So you see we’ll always have a new house; it’s a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the latest improvements. They invent everything all over again every five years, and it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things.”

It is easy to feel James’s rage and exasperation at the new ethos of easy and quick change which has eaten up his city of old values, and destroyed the few buildings and streets with many rich old associations for him. His ghosts have given way to images of newness, glibness and quick profit. It is as though the solid world, exemplified and embodied by old rooms in old houses, has dissolved, and the purpose of Washington Square is to rekindle the power of what has been lost, build the square again, word by word, until it and all its associations, the old familiarities, have been restored.

***

This is the introduction to a new edition of Washington Square, reprinted by Manderley Press.

The weather was reasonable; we walked in the lovely gardens, to find there were Unionists outside the gate carrying placards denouncing what was about to occur. The Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army were protecting us from them. Among the protestors was Dowager Lady Brookeborough, the widow of Lord Brookeborough, who had been Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1943 to 1963.

In 1933, addressing an Orange rally, Lord Brookeborough had famously declared: “Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster … If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms we are traitors to Ulster … I would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ good Protestant lads and lassies.”

Now, the man’s widow was outside protesting. It struck me that maybe something serious was about to transpire. Soon, we learned that the Dublin government was to have an advisory role in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. It seemed like the first step in a longer process that would lead to the further integration of the two parts of the island. The Agreement was signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald, the Irish prime minister.

After a first round of comments by the political leaders, the journalists were handed the agreement and given a short time to read it before Thatcher and FitzGerald would return. As Thatcher passed my row, she turned her fierce attention on me and the pressman beside me, a well-known radical. She looked at us as though she knew we were trouble. She was very, very intimidating.

Up to then, it was generally acknowledged that Ulster Unionists would resist to the death any move to let Southern Ireland be involved in their affairs. They had made this clear in April 1914 when the Ulster Volunteer Force had imported 25,000 rifles into Northern Ireland, thus to strengthen them against the possibility of Home Rule. After the First World War, they had emphasized that they would never accept the inclusion of Ulster in an independent Ireland. At first, they wanted only the four most Protestant counties included in a separate state, while others wanted all nine counties of Ulster, including their sizeable Catholic population. The state of six counties that became Northern Ireland was a compromise.

In 1973, the Unionists successfully opposed the Sunningdale Agreement to establish a power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland by calling a general strike, forcing the British to cave in and abandon the agreement. Thatcher, despite private misgivings, made clear that she intended to stand over the Anglo-Irish Agreement. There was a massive protest in Belfast; 400,000 Unionists signed a petition against the Agreement. James Molyneaux, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, spoke of “universal cold fury” towards it; Ian Paisley said that Thatcher was “Jezebel who sought to destroy Israel in a day.”

As Thatcher stood her ground, it occurred to me how different Ireland would have been had earlier prime ministers — Gladstone, Balfour, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Harold Wilson — been as clear-eyed and determined.

In other words, what would Ireland be like if the British government had decided in 1921 and 1922, or indeed before, that Home Rule would be granted to all of the island of Ireland, and that the country would not be partitioned?

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In the short term, this decision would have been disastrous. The sectarian attacks against Catholics that happened in Belfast in 1921 would likely have been more ferocious. The reaction of the British government to these attacks and to Unionist militarisation would have been crucial. Also crucial would have been the type of electoral system to be used in the new Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland multi-seat constituencies and proportional representation are used. In a five-seat constituency, for example, you vote for candidates in order of preference. This means that the fifth seat, or even the fourth, can often go to a small party or an independent candidate. Parliament can thus be made up of many shades of opinion.

On the presumption that, even though there would have been no civil war, two main parties would still have emerged in the South, then it is probable that the Unionists would have controlled the balance of power in Dublin. It is also probable that Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland would, on local issues, have joined forces in Dublin. And Unionist politicians would have had the chance to become government ministers in an independent Ireland.

What we need to imagine is Lord Brookeborough as Foreign Minister or Minister for Defence with Michael Collins, who was in fact assassinated in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, as Prime Minister, and Éamon de Valera, who was Prime Minister for most of the time between 1932 and 1959 and President thereafter until 1973, as Minister for Finance. This is strange, but not as strange as what eventually happened — Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness chuckling together as First Minister and Deputy First Minister.

The power of the Catholic church in southern Ireland would have been diminished by a united Ireland in some ways, but not in others. On certain sexual matters — such as homosexuality and abortion — the Unionists and the Southerners would have been equally conservative. But they would have divided on the right to divorce. They both would have wanted separate schools for Protestants and Catholics. But the Unionists would not have tolerated church involvement in government on a day-to-day basis. It would simply have been anathema to them.

Also, because Belfast was a more commercial and industrialised city than Dublin, it would provide a bigger and more diverse gene pool to sit on boards and work in semi-state companies. One of the problems the Republic of Ireland has had is the density of political space. People in the circles of power often know each other too well. It makes for coziness and laziness and lack of accountability.

But the Unionists would have brought something else to Dublin that Dublin needed. Their speech tends to be direct; they don’t prevaricate. They also are viscerally opposed to arbitrary authority and have a fundamental belief in parliament and in law and in the idea of an autonomous conscience.

It is likely, then, that they would have been appalled at the prospect of the Catholic church running orphanages and homes for unmarried mothers without any serious regulation.

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The first real division between Unionist and Nationalist would have occurred in 1939. The Unionists would have wanted to join Britain in the war. Seventeen years of sharing power in Dublin would not have lessened their passionate connection to the Crown and the Empire. While more than 40,000 citizens of a neutral Éire actually enlisted in the British Army, there would still have been serious opposition to declaring war. But while Éire was officially neutral, it tended to be neutral on the side of the Allies. If a British airman came down over Southern Ireland, for example, he was immediately repatriated, by being sent over the border. If a German airman came down, on the other hand, he was interned for the duration of the war.

After the war, almost everything that happened in Ireland North and South would have been different in a United Ireland. For example, in 1948, the Irish Free State was declared to be the Republic of Ireland. With Unionists in Dublin, it is unlikely that this could have been so easily done, and more probable that Ireland would have remained within the Commonwealth.

Another example is education. Northern Ireland benefitted from the Education Act of 1944 which gave students free secondary education. This did not happen in the Republic of Ireland until 1967. In a United Ireland, with much of the energy of the Labour Movement in the North subsumed into sectarian differences, it is hard to imagine any great urge to create a free and modern health service or equality in education. It is also unlikely that an NHS would have been set up in a United Ireland until much later than in Britain.

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Just as the late Sixties saw a new crop of politicians on the nationalist side in the North — figures such as John Hume, Eamonn McCann, Bernadette Devlin, Austin Currie — it is possible that the lure of high office would have attracted a similar set of politicians on the Unionist side. That does not mean Ian Paisley and his supporters would not have been powerful. But their voices in the Irish parliament would merely have been among many from Northern Ireland.

The big question as we imagine a United Ireland over the past 50 years is what would have happened to the men and women who, in the real world, became IRA volunteers or Sinn Fein leaders. I like to think that they would have directed their energy and sense of grievance not against Britain — since Britain had deftly stepped aside — but against inequality in Ireland. I like to imagine that they would have joined forces with the Labour Party and the trade union movement in Dublin.

In the meantime, the establishment parties would have become good Europeans. Ireland would still have joined the Common Market in 1973. Its leaders would have become skilled at applying for grants. Dublin and Belfast by now would be connected with a fast train system and a good motorway. This corridor between the two cities, taking in Drogheda, Dundalk, Newry and Portadown, would have become a powerhouse of innovation. South Armagh would be a sought-after site for new industry. The area would have attracted intense foreign investment in the very years when, in the sad real world, the northern side was tearing itself apart. Ireland would be a different country.