The novel is a dark comedy which follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe to bring the son of his widowed fiancée back to the family business.

Lewis Lambert Strether, the protagonist of the novel, is a cultured man in his fifties from the fictional town of Woollett, Massachusetts, who is dispatched to Paris to find Chad, the wayward son of his fiancée Mrs Newsome.

The group clearly doesn't see Paris, life's possibilities, Chad or Madame de Vionnet in the same way that Strether does.

Strether takes a day for himself to enjoy the countryside, and happens upon Chad and Madame de Vionnet in a manner that makes it evident that they are romantically and sexually involved.

Chad seems tempted to return to Woollett, which might mean the sundering of his relationship with Madame de Vionnet, despite his acknowledgement that this would abandon her to a condition of social and emotional desolation.

Henry James got the idea for The Ambassadors from his friend, novelist William Dean Howells, who while visiting his son in Paris was so impressed with European culture that he wondered if life hadn't passed him by.

The theme of liberation from a cramped, almost starved, emotional life into a more generous and gracious existence plays throughout The Ambassadors, yet it is noteworthy that James does not naïvely portray Paris as a faultless paradise for culturally stunted Americans.

As one critic proposed, Strether does not shed his American straitjacket only to be fitted with a more elegant European model, but instead learns to evaluate every situation on its merits, without prejudices, by selection.

Strether, when giving his final account to Maria Gostrey, justifies his decisions by connecting his intermediary position to his concerns about gaining experience (and pleasure) whilst working on behalf of others.

Moreover, at that time, he also lacked duplicate copies of the omitted passages, and those two circumstances resulted in significant textual variations in the Methuen edition.

In 1950, Robert E. Young, knowing neither the Methuen edition difference nor the details of James's work on the novel, argued[4] that the NYE order was incorrect, based upon the chronology of the story's events.

Moreover, he controversially claimed that when James wrote to novelist Mrs Humphry Ward mentioning a "fearful ... weakness"[7] he was referring to the chapter order in her Methuen edition copy.

[citation needed] James's evocation of Paris has gained many plaudits, as the city becomes a well-realized symbol of the beauty and the sorrow of European culture.

It is true that Strether shows an ability to grow in understanding and good judgment, although some critics have seen him as limited and timid, despite his European experiences.