Kate Croy's mother was born to wealth and privilege, but she threw it all away to marry Kate's father, a penniless opium addict who admits to having stolen from his wife. After her mother's death, Kate is offered an opportunity to ret...
The heroine of this powerful novel is the spirited young American Isabel Archer. Blessed by nature and fortune, she journeys to Europe to seek her future, but what she finds may prove to be her undoing. She is courted by three men: ...
Best of Henry James: The Portrait of ...
Henry JamesThe works collected here span the early and late periods of Henry James' career. Widely considered the finest of his early novels, The Portrait of a Lady exemplifies a familiar theme in James' writing: the meeting of Europe and Americ...
Eugenia, a baroness divorced from a German prince, and her bohemian brother, Felix, are coming back to America. Raised and cultured in Europe, they are returning destitute to New England to seek out their rich and innocent cousins. ...
Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet are like two sides of the same coin: while the whimsical and egotistical Roderick recklessly follows his passions in the name of art, altruistic Rowland lives with restraint and measure. The two are ...
Self-made American millionaire Christopher Newman arrives in Paris brimming with hope and optimism, excited to experience the culture and, hopefully, find the perfect woman to become his wife. After a chance encounter with American ex...
Bachelor John Marcher is haunted by the premonition that something terrible lies in store for him, like a 'beast in the jungle' lying in wait. So he spends his life in idleness, unable to carry out his dreams or desires, while his fri...
The novel The Spoils of Poynton represents a major turning point in the stylistic development of American literary master Henry James, as he eased into the tense, taut drawing-room dramas that would come to characterize his later work...
Pressured into a political career by his traditional, establishmentarian family, Nick Dormer longs to be a painter. Eventually, encouraged by the carefree aesthete Gabriel Nash, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, he resigns from Parliament a...
Perhaps the most brilliantly successful ghost story ever written, The Turn of the Screw creates a terrifyingly believable impression of innocent children so corrupted by evil that they remain deceptive pictures of innocent beauty. The...
One of the most daunting ghost stories to ever be written, Henry James' Turn of the Screw follows the transformation of Miles (age 10) and Flora (age 8) from well behaved children to deceitful liars. When a governess comes to their ...
Following a violent and messy divorce, young Maisie Farange floats back and forth between her parents, Beale and Ida, who use her as a weapon to torment each other in their on-going, internecine war. Eventually the parents remarry, an...