[2] To find himself the recipient of such praise was hardly a likely outcome when one considers the conservative rural background that he emerged from, saying of his youth spent in his family home that it was characterised by "a great deal of silence".

[3] Tóibín chose to first address his own homosexuality, with no great deal of ceremony, in his essay “New Ways of Killing Your Father” published in November 1993 for London Review of Books.

This reclamation is best captured by the critic Jennifer M. Jeffers when she says 'Irish novels in the last decade of the twentieth century push the heterosexual culture to see its “inbuilt” gender identifications, needless to say, this is not a comfortable or easy process.

Irish religious, gender, sexual and material precedents in fiction that overtly challenge heterosexual culture and regulation are basically nonexistent'.

[10] American writer John Updike described the book in The New Yorker (2004-06-28): “Tóibín's subject is the inward James, the master of literary creation and a vast hushed arena of dreams and memories and hoarded observations”.

[14] The impetus for the novel's composition first came from his collection of essays entitled  Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar (2002), in which an opportunity was taken for deeper rumination on the sexual identity of queer authors.

However, Tóibín is often keen to point out also that The Master is not simply an exploration of James's sexuality, “I really wasn't that interested in his homosexuality other than what it offered me as a drama of renunciation.”[6] The Master is written in the genre of historical fiction and in a third person narrative that emphasises the intimate inner monologue of Henry James, a style of writing that The Telegraph (London)'s Benjamin Markovits refers to as 'Tóibín's speciality'.

Markovits chooses to draw a direct line between Tóibín's prose and that of the man he is depicting in virtue of their shared lucidity and precision of language, 'so fine it can render the slightest variation in mood or circumstance'.

This pivot in critical approach was born from an increasing number of James's correspondence to young men coming to light in virtue of their sometimes veiled (sometimes not) eroticism.

[17] This point is further clarified by Tóibín himself within his collection of essays All a Novelist Needs when he notes that 'In dealing with James's attitude towards Ireland ... and indeed towards his homosexuality, it is important to remember that he was in both instances non-practicing.'