How did Henry James’s later prose style differ from his earlier writing?

Henry James’s prose style underwent a significant evolution throughout his career, transitioning from the descriptive realism of his early work to a highly complex, "major" phase at the turn of the 20th century.1

Initially, James functioned as a realist who provided minute, detailed descriptions of his settings and characters. However, as his career progressed, he moved away from this crowded stage, instead focusing on small groups of characters in tense situations. His later prose became increasingly allusive, dense, and charged with symbolic imagery.1

This shift was driven by his desire to project subjective experience through a more flexible prose style, a development influenced in part by his practice of dictating his work directly to a typist. Furthermore, his later writing utilized sophisticated technical devices, such as shifting points of view and a retrospective working out of drama through multiple angles of vision. While his early novels often explored international conflicts between Americans and Europeans, his later work became deeply preoccupied with the psychological processes, perceptions, and developing awareness of his characters.12