The novels of Henry James are famous–some might say infamous–for their ambiguous and problematic endings, and the end of The Ambassadors, with Strether's famous renunciation of Maria Gostrey's offer of a life together, is probably the most notorious in this respect. Typically, the classic novelists of the nineteenth-century whom James admired most–Balzac, Hawthorne's (though not at the end of The Blithedale Romance, that most "Jamesian" of Hawthorne's novels), Dickens, Thackeray, Turgenev–neatly resolved at the end the issues raised throughout their novels. The final chapters of The Scarlet Letter and Fathers and Sons are perfect examples of this tendency to neatly "tie up" loose threads. Rather than settling issues, the endings of James's fictions raise them by refusing to provide obvious explanations. In this respect, James's fictions are more akin to their modernist successors than to their realist predecessors. As Frank Kermode has demonstrated, James's endings withhold satisfaction from readers, obliging them to look back into the text and to engage in further interpretation (Kermode 68).