This thesis seeks to better understand the significance of the word ‘life’ in Henry James’s oeuvre. My central claim is that James draws attention to the vague, ambiguous, and tautological ways in which this word is used in everyday speech, and that he does so in order to pose questions about the descriptive strategies we rely upon to make sense of our lives. Through close readings of a range of late works, I explore how commonplace ideas about ‘life’ are continually in the process of breaking down in James’s novels and tales, and argue that his narrative style works to deconstruct rigidly voluntaristic and deterministic conceptions of leading a life. A secondary argument concerns the presence of the word ‘life’ in James’s literary criticism. Going against the grain of scholarly consensus, I demonstrate that ‘life’ is a central term in James’s critical vocabulary, and suggest that it is deployed to invoke aspects of aesthetic experience and creation that cannot be accounted for in propositional terms. I claim that a phenomenological examination of this rhetorical gesture is necessary if we are to grasp the decisive role that James and the word ‘life’ played in the development of twentieth-century Anglophone literary criticism.