Shy Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, shares an uncommonly close bond with her father. Widower Adam Verver, a financier and art connoisseur, has bought everything he wants, including a titled husband for his daughter. Maggie is charmed by Prince Amerigo, an Italian nobleman of reduced means. Wishing to provide her father with companionship, she persuades him to marry her best friend, Charlotte Stant. But unbeknownst to Maggie and Adam, Charlotte and the Prince are concealing a guilty secret that will strike at the foundations of both marriages. Henry James explores his favorite themes in this novel—money, class, desire, and the collision of European and American cultures. Excerpt: So much for some only of the suggestions of re-perusal here since, all the while, I feel myself awaited by a pair of appeals really more pressing than either of those just met; a minor and a major appeal, as I may call them: the former of which I take first. I have so thoroughly gone into things, in an expository way, on the ground covered by this collection of my writings, that I should still judge it superficial to have spoken no word for so salient a feature of our Edition as the couple of dozen decorative illustra tions. This series of frontispieces contribute less to orna ment, I recognise, than if Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn's beautiful photographs, which they reproduce, had had to suf fer less reduction; but of those that have suffered least the beauty, to my sense, remains great, and I indulge at any rate in this glance at our general intention for the sake of the small page of history thereby added to my already volumin ous, yet on the whole so unabashed, memoranda. I should in fact be tempted here, but for lack of space, by the very question itself at large - that question of the general ac ceptability of illustration coming up sooner or later, in these days, for the author of any text putting forward illustrative claims (that is producing an effect of illustration) by its own intrinsic virtue and so finding itself elbowed, on that ground, by another and a competitive process. The essence of any representational work is of course to bristle with immediate images; and I, for one, should have looked much askance at the proposal, on the part of my associates in the whole business, to graft or grow, at whatever point, a picture by another hand on my own picture this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident. Which remark reflects heavily, of course, on the picture-book quality that contempo rary English and American prose appears more and more destined, by the conditions of publication, to consent, how ever grudgingly, to see imputed to it. But a moment's thought points the moral of the danger.
Author
Henry James, OM (1843-1916), son of theologian Henry James Sr., brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author, one of the founders and leaders of a school of realism in fiction. He spent much of his life in England and became a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for a series of major novels in which he portrayed the encounter of America with Europe. His plots centered on personal relationships, the proper exercise of power in such relationships, and other moral questions. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allowed him to explore the phenomena of consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James insisted that writers in Great Britain and America should be allowed the greatest freedom possible in presenting their view of the world, as French authors were. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to realistic fiction, and foreshadowed the modernist work of the twentieth century. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel writing, biography, autobiography, and criticism,and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales.
