Product Description

Beautiful Kate Croy may have been left penniless by her relatives, but her bold, ambitious nature ensures she will not succumb meekly to a life of poverty. If the financial circumstances of Merton Densher, the man she is passionately in love with, are not sufficient to secure her future, perhaps her cunning will. So when Milly Theale arrives in Europe from America, laden with wealth but also gravely ill, Kate sees an opportunity to exploit her vulnerability and devises a plan that will see her and Merton financially provided for. Her scheming is flawed though, for it fails to take into account the inconstancies of the human heart. John Bayley's introduction examines the novel in the context of James's other late, great works.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #371401 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

About the Author
Born in 1843 in New York, Henry James was of Scottish and Irish ancestry. He attended schools in New York, London, Paris and Geneva before going to Law School at Harvard in 1862. He started writing short stories and reviews for American journals in 1875 and then went on to write some twenty highly popular and acclaimed novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians. He died in 1916.

Customer Reviews

It's like watching a slow chess game played out.
Make no mistake: this is a major novel. It will take everything you've got and then some to get through it. The plotline is simple: who gets to take advantage of a rich dying girl before the others do? But the novel is not about its plot; it's about its language. And what language! It's like trying to swim upstream against prose badly translated out of a dead tongue. Sentences perpetually delaying conclusions and meanings put the reader in the same position as the characters: trapped in amber struggling to get free from their situations. The prose style becomes an affectation one gets past; it's no harder than adjusting to Shakespeare, and easier than Joyce. The language is the true hero of the book, for there's no one else suitable for the position (Milly seems more object than subject as the novel progresses, and is removed for the last third). The chief interest consists largely of what James is going to do next--which viewpoint to take? which episode to develop? All this said, the book does have punch at the end, as characters play their hands and admit to one another and themselves what they won't do.

Hypnotic
I love Henry James' work, but getting through it is a trial of endurance. Don't try this if you are coming to his work for the first time. Try something shorter like "The Turn of the Screw" which is superb. This is also superb, but is so dense that the language and style takes enormous concentration in order to do the novel full justice. As usual with James' it is not the most cheerful of subject matters and centres around his preoccupation with American naivete struggling to survive in worldly Europe, but it is wonderfully tragic and has some gorgeous characters in it. For the same type of thing on the other side of the ocean try Edith Wharton.

James' Best
In my humble opinion, this is James' best work. It surpasses even "The Ambassadors" and "The Golden Bowl" as well as his more often read, not to say more ubiquitous (since lousy movies from Hollywood seem to have revived interest in the author in a manner he would have found distinctly distasteful), earlier masterpieces, short and long. Shame on The Library of America for stalling out on its republication of James' work before getting to the late achievements. Here is one vote for completion of the canon in the usual estimable LOA volumes.

This is a novel to be savoured and treasured. If you're up to late James (he wrote ghost stories, but he's no Stephen King), read on without hesitation.