The Wheel Of Time is a short story by Henry James, first published two installments in the Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1892 and included in the collection The Private Life, published in 1893.

Fanny Knocker is a very, very plain young woman. She is introduced to the extremely handsome, thoroughly impoverished, younger son of an old family. What will transpire?

This tale relates another of Henry James’s symmetric situations, where obvious parallels or inversions are drawn between two characters or, in this case, two generations. Critics have had a field day, of course, with the inability of the central male characters to bring themselves to marry (ugly) women.

Henry James, OM (Order of Merit) (1843-1916) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism.

He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from a character's point of view allowed him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators brought a new depth to narrative fiction.

Henry James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916.