The article analyses the short-story \u201cThe Master at St Bartholomew\u2019s Hospital 1914\u20131916\u201d by Joyce Carol Oates (2007) in the broader context of the Jamesian biofiction, a series of novels and tales featuring Henry James as their protagonist. The addition of the prefix \u201cbio-\u201d to \u201cfiction\u201d points out the hybrid nature of these texts, which are a melange of biography, autobiography, criticism and fiction. Oates\u2019s story not only epitomizes this hybridity, but it also proves to be an exploration of the potentiality of this subgenre to penetrate the mystery surrounding James\u2019s persona and saturate the lacunae in his biography by resorting to what David Lodge defined as \u201cthe novelist\u2019s licence\u201d. The short-story is yet another evidence of Oates\u2019s fascination with the unsaid in James\u2019s life and prose, because it revolves around the silence into which he sank at the outbreak of the Great War, when he did not write anything in his pocket diaries for three months. In an attempt to go beyond the limits of the historical record, Oates gives insights into the mind of the author by depicting a Henry James in crisis \u2013 nagged by doubts about his artistic legacy \u2013 in an atmosphere of uncertainty enhanced by a complex intertextual play. The result is \u2018a Henry James\u2019 slightly divergent from the historical one: thus, the tale advocates the inaccessibility of the private life of a real individual. Nonetheless, the acknowledgement of this limit spurs the celebration of fictional imagination
