Henry James has always been an acquired taste. Academics typically love his stylistic subtlety, while casual readers find the slow-moving plots exasperating.

Recreational readers won't be excited by Floyd Horowitz's 20-year project of finding and verifying short stories that James wrote under various pseudonyms.

James wrote the stories in this collection from ages 10 to 17. They foreshadow the themes of the author's later fiction.

In all these stories, female characters serve as representatives of class positions. There are the coquettes who stand for the culturally elite women, and the seamstresses of a lower class who require a bit of noblesse oblige from their social superiors.

Coquettes can be found in virtually every story. Coquette was, of course, the high-society term for what modern readers know as a "tease." Many aren't serious about getting married, preferring the attention and beseeching of suitors. And when they're willing to get married, the reason is invariably money.

The best of the coquette stories presented here is A Breach of a Promise of Marriage, which can compete with James' finest fiction. Belle Savage, a friend of the narrator's wife, is concerned only with eligible men. The story begins with her reported complaint that there were no eligible bachelors at church that Sunday.

When she lets the narrator's young friend Ned Vernon pursue her and allows a brief kiss and a vague promise of marriage, it seems like more of Belle's game-playing rather than genuine romance. Ned is just as powerless as the others in the marriage game, but he's also a shrewd lawyer who finds a legal way of forcing Belle to marry him.

Seamstresses, for their part, are instantly notable in these stories by the simple fact that they have jobs. Women in The Sacrifice, The Rose-Colored Silk, Alone and Sprite Transformed are the teenage James' way of exploring his father's socialism, which often imagined the working class as secular versions of religious martyrs.

Alone is the best example. The story's heroine, Jennie Dell, is an abstraction - poor in material things but rich in spiritual power. She's saved by her kindhearted, modest employer, who befriends her first and romances her second. He's the prototype for a typical Jamesian hero, the mature, asexual man who can meet a woman's emotional needs.

The collection's final story, A Hasty Marriage, unites the coquette and the seamstress. Sylvia, the heroine, is as economically vulnerable as Jennie Dell and all the other seamstresses. When her father dies and his fortune disappears, she's forced to leave the elite boarding school she was attending. Taken in briefly by her uncle and his resentful wife, Sylvia tries being a governess to their children but finds herself ill-equipped for such work.

Insulted and cast out by her aunt, she's in need of someone to save her, and the two suitors who emerge are of distinct backgrounds: Walter Drummond and Mr. Harter - male equivalents of the coquette and the seamstress. Walter is ultimately selfish and petulant, while Mr. Harter is smart, ethical and rich but without any ego. Their two offerings of love are clearly differentiated: Walter wants Sylvia to fulfill his narcissism, and Mr. Harter wants her because he wants to help her.

On their own, these stories are moderately interesting and evoke an era in American literary history. But unsurprisingly, they're no match for James' mature stories and novels. These stories are fascinating, however, as early episodes in the story of a writer bound and determined to achieve greatness.

The Uncollected Short Stories of Henry James

• Edited by Floyd Horowitz. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 336 pages, $26

• Grade: B

Chip Rhodes is associate professor of English at Colorado State University. He's the author of "Structures of the Jazz Age" and the forthcoming "Love and Hate in Hollywood."