Wordsworth American Classics
3 total works
Companion in themes, period and setting to "What Maisie Knew, the Awkward Age" is another of Henry James's studies of innocence exposed to currupting influences.
Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its fullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and the magnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceit and betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about the frailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of need and desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these three characters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-lit piazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almost unprecedented in his work. Under its brilliant, coruscating surfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical and psychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers an unfettered vision of our civilization and its discontents. It represents a culmination of James's art and, as such, of the art of the novel itself.
Set in New York, this closely constructed novel belongs to James' early period. like Portrait of a Lady it studies the plight of an innocent heiress who is deceived by the looks and charm of a worthless suitor. At the same time she is striving to be loyal to a cold and forbidding father.