Books by Henry James

Classic Ghost Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Gothic/Horror)

by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, M. R. James, J. S. LeFanu, Mrs. Henry Wood, Amelia B. Edwards, Fitz-James O'Brien, Henry James

Assembled from the works of the finest masters of the genre, these compelling narratives promise to raise gooseflesh and accelerate pulses with their supernatural scenarios.
Featured stories include J. S. LeFanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," with a mysterious old mansion as the focal point; Mary E. Wilkins' "The Lost Ghost," in which a strange child's disturbing presence instills fear and foreboding in all those she encounters; Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body-Snatchers"; "Mrs. Zant and the Ghost," by Wilkie Collins; and other gripping works by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Ralph Cram, Mrs. Henry Wood, Amelia B. Edwards, Fitz-James O'Brien, and M. R. James.
Rich in detail and ghoulish incidents, this modestly priced collection will thrill readers who appreciate tales of terror as well as devotees of well-crafted literature.

The Ambassadors (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

by Henry James

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to," declares the primary "ambassador" of this 1903 novel, adding, "It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?"
In this complex tale of self-discovery, Henry James invokes his favorite theme: the clash of American innocence with European experience. It traces the path of an aging idealist, Lambert Strether, who arrives in Paris intending to persuade his young charge to abandon an obsession with a French woman and return home. Once abroad, however, Strether arrives at unexpected conclusions.
Henry James regarded The Ambassadors as his finest work. Astute, humorous, and intelligent, this masterpiece from the pinnacle of the author's long and brilliant career remains ever vital.

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

Capturing the grandeur of a gracious, splendid Europe of wealth and Old World sensibilities, this glorious, complex novel has become a touchstone for a great writer’s entire literary achievement. From the opening pages, when the high-spirited American girl Isabel Archer arrives at the English manor Gardencourt, James’s luminous, superbly crafted prose creates an atmosphere of intensity, expectation, and incomparable beauty.

Isabel, who has been taken abroad by an eccentric aunt to fulfill her potential, attracts the passions of a British aristocrat and a brash American, as well as the secret adoration of her invalid cousin, Ralph Touchett. But her vulnerability and innocence lead her not to love but to a fatal entrapment in intrigue, deception, and betrayal. This brilliant interior drama of the forming of a woman’s consciousness makes The Portrait of a Lady a masterpiece of James’s middle years.

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Intelligent, beautiful and vivacious, Isabel Archer fascinates and intimidates the elite society of Albany, New York. Fiercely protective of her independence, she travels to England with her aunt to escape a persistent suitor but, upon inheriting a considerable fortune, falls into the sway of the devious Mrs Merle who whisks her off to Italy. There she is seduced by the narcissistic Gilbert Osmond, an art collector who will stop at nothing to possess her, and whose connection to Mrs Merle is shrouded in mystery.

Widely accepted as Henry James' great masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady is a poignant and intense exploration of freedom and identity.

This Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an introduction by award-winning novelist Colm Tóibín.

The Uncollected Henry James: Newly Discovered Stories

by Henry James, Floyd R Horowitz

More than two decades of research, study, and literary detection lie behind this treasury of stories by one of the undisputed giants in the field of American fiction, as Professor Floyd Horowitz here offers a collection of tales that he himself has authenticated to be the work of the prodigiously gifted Henry James. The author of such celebrated novels as The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors, James is also justly remembered for his novellas and scores of short stories. And there may indeed be scores more, as this important volume shows. Published anonymously or under noms de plume in magazines like nineteenth-century New York’s favorite The Knickerbocker, Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine, The National Magazine, and The Continental, a Civil War propaganda magazine, these previously uncollected pieces represent both apprentice work and early stories that already bear the mark of Jamesian artistry. Written in a period of more than ten years before James’s first signed fiction appeared (in 1865) and readily accepted by the publishers and editors among his father’s excellent connections, these uncovered stories add significantly to the James canon.

The Uncollected Henry James

by Henry James

More than two decades of research, study, and literary detection lie behind this treasury of stories by one of the undisputed giants in the field of American fiction. Professor Floyd Horowitz here offers a stunning collection of tales that he himself has authenticated to be the youthful work of the prodigiously gifted Henry James. Published anonymously or under noms de plume in magazines, these previously uncollected pieces represent both apprentice work and early stories that already bear the mark of Jamesian artistry. Written in a period of more than ten years before James's first signed fiction appeared (in 1865) and readily accepted by the publishers and editors among his father's excellent connections, these uncovered stories add significantly to the James canon.

The Outcry (New York Review Books Classics)

by Henry James

The Outcry, Henry James's final novel, is an effervescent comedy of money and manners. Breckenridge Bender, a very rich American with a distinct resemblance to J.P. Morgan, arrives in England with the purpose of acquiring some very great art; he is directed to Dedborough, the estate of the debt-ridden Lord Theign. But plutocrat and aristocrat come into unexpected conflict when a young connoisseur, out to establish his own reputation, declares a prize painting from the lord's collection to be in fact an even rarer, and pricier, work than had been thought.

A popular success in its own day, but long unavailable since and now almost unknown, The Outcry is one of the most surprising and amusing of James's works. Here he explores questions of privilege and initiative, repute and honor, high art and base calculation, revisiting some of his favorite themes with a deft and winning touch.

WHAT MAISIE KNEW (CLASSICS S.)

by Henry James

An innocent young girl who is caught between her divorced parents attempts to understand life and its injustices

The Princess Casamassima (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Henry James conceived the character of Hyacinth Robinson—his 'little presumptuous adventurer with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity'—while walking the streets of London. Brought up in poverty, Hyacinth has nevertheless developed aesthetic tastes that heighten his awareness of the sordid misery around him. He is drawn into the secret world of revolutionary politics and, in a moment of fervour, makes a vow that he will assassinate a major political figure. Soon after this he meets the beautiful Princess Casamassima. Captivated by her world of wealth and nobility, art and beauty, Hyacinth loses faith in radicalism, 'the beastly cause'. But tormented by his belief in honour, he must face an agonizing, and ultimately tragic, dilemma. The Princess Casamassima is one of James's most personal novels and yet one of the most socially engaged.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Washington Square (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Rejected by the man she loves when he discovers that her father will disinherit her if they marry, Catherine Sloper again meets Morris Townsend after the death of her forbidding and domineering parent

Washington Square (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

A masterful novel of New York society by a champion of literary realism

When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her desire to win her father's love and approval and her passion for the first man who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an agonising dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the restrictions that others seek to place on her freedom. James's masterly novel deftly interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Aspern Papers and Other Tales (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

An impressive new selection of Henry James’s short stories, edited by Pulitzer Prize–nominated James biographer Michael Gorra

This volume gathers seven of the very best of Henry James’s short stories, all exploring the relationship between art and life. In the title story, “The Aspern Papers,” a critic is determined to get his hands on a great poet’s papers hidden in a faded Venetian house—no mater what the human cost. “The Author of Beltraffio,” “The Lesson of the Master,” and “The Figure in the Carpet” all focus on naive young men’s unsettling encounters with their literary heroes. In “The Middle Years,” a dying novelist begins to glimpse his own potential, while “The Real Thing” and “Greville Fane” explore the tension between artistic and commercial success. These fables of the creative life reveal James at his ironic, provocative best.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

A chilling new collection of Henry James's short stories exploring the uncanny, including "The Turn of the Screw," the basis for the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor

In "The Turn of the Screw," one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a
governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking
the children in her care. It is accompanied here by several more of the very best of
Henry James's short stories, all exploring ghosts and the uncanny.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Golden Bowl (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

A new edition of Henry James's searing study of marriage and Infidelity

Set in England, The Golden Bowl is Henry James's highly charged exploration of adultery, jealousy, and possession that continues and challenges James's characteristic exploration of the battle between American innocence and European experience. Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, and her widowed father, Adam, lead a life of wealth and refinement in London. They are both getting married: Maggie to Prince Amerigo, an impoverished Italian aristocrat, and Adam to the beautiful but penniless Charlotte Stant. But both father and daughter are unaware that their new conquests share a secret - one for which all concerned must pay the price. This story completes what critics have called the "major phase" of James?s career.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

The greatest expression of his talent for witty, observant explorations of what it means to 'live well', Henry James's The Ambassadors is edited with an introduction and notes by Adrian Poole in Penguin Classics.

Concerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs Newsome sends her 'ambassador' Strether from Massachusetts to Paris to extricate him. Strether's mission, however, is gradually undermined as he falls under the spell of the city and finds Chad refined rather than corrupted by its influence and that of his charming companion, Madame de Vionnet, and her daughter, Jeanne. As the summer wears on, Mrs Newsome concludes that she must send another envoy to confront the errant Chad - and a Strether whose view of the world has changed profoundly. One of the greatest of James's late works, The Ambassadors is a subtle and witty exploration of different responses to a European environment.

This edition of The Ambassadors includes a chronology, further reading, glossary, notes and an introduction discussing the novel in the context of James's other works on Americans in Europe, and the novel's portrayal of Paris.

The Europeans: A Sketch (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

An incomparable Henry James novel in a new edition

Featuring a new introduction, it is a brilliant and sophisticated satire of manners and morals in the best Jamesian tradition. The Europeans, one of James's most popular and optimistic novels, has at its center an expatriated American raised in Europe who, determined to find a new husband, flees from her crumbling marriage and travels to Boston with her younger brother.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

What Maisie Knew (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

A new edition of the innovative, emotionally complex novel.

After her parents’ bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled between her selfish mother and vain father, who value her only as a means for provoking each other. Maisie—solitary, observant, and wise beyond her years—is drawn into an increasingly entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual betrayal until she is finally compelled to choose her own future. Published in 1897 as Henry James was experimenting with narrative technique and fascinated by the idea of the child’s-eye view, What Maisie Knew is a subtle yet devastating portrayal of an innocent adrift in a corrupt society.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Regarded by many as Henry James's finest work, and a lucid tragedy exploring the distance between money and happiness, The Portrait of a Lady contains an introduction by Philip Horne in Penguin Classics. When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy the freedom that her fortune has opened up and to determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. Then she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond. Charming and cultivated, Osmond sees Isabel as a rich prize waiting to be taken. Beneath his veneer of civilized behaviour, Isabel discovers cruelty and a stifling darkness. In this portrait of a 'young woman affronting her destiny', Henry James created one of his most magnificent heroines, and a story of intense poignancy.

This edition of The Portrait of a Lady, based on the earliest published copy of the novel, is the version read first and loved by most readers in James's lifetime. It also contains a chronology, further reading, notes and an introduction by Philip Horne.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Daisy Miller (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Turn of the Screw (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

A chilling ghost story, wrought with tantalising ambiguity, the basis for the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is edited with an introduction and notes by David Bromwich in Penguin Classics.

In what Henry James called a 'trap for the unwary', The Turn of the Screw tells of a nameless young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence or something else entirely? The Turn of the Screw is James's great masterpiece of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension and has influenced subsequent ghost stories and films such as The Innocents, starring Deborah Kerr, and The Others, starring Nicole Kidman.

This Penguin Classics edition contains a chronology, further reading, notes and an introduction by David Bromwich examining the dark ambiguity of James's work and the inseparability of narrative from point-of-view.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories (Penguin Clothbound Classics)

by Henry James

A chilling new collection of Henry James's short stories exploring the uncanny, including "The Turn of the Screw," the basis for the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor

In "The Turn of the Screw," one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a
governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking
the children in her care. It is accompanied here by several more of the very best of
Henry James's short stories, all exploring ghosts and the uncanny.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces

by Henry James

This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing—character, plot, point of view, inspiration—and explains how he came to write novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American. As Blackmur puts it, “criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful.”
The latest edition of this influential work includes a foreword by bestselling author Colm Tóibín, whose critically acclaimed novel The Master is told from the point of view of Henry James. As a guide not only to James’s inspiration and execution, but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of James’s fiction and to aspiring writers.

Daisy Miller (Modern Library Classics)

by Henry James

Originally published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1878 and in book form in 1879, Daisy Miller brought Henry James his first widespread commercial and critical success. The young Daisy Miller, an American on holiday with her mother on the shores of Switzerland’s Lac Leman, is one of James’s most vivid and tragic characters. Daisy’s friendship with an American gentleman, Mr. Winterbourne, and her subsequent infatuation with a passionate but impoverished Italian bring to life the great Jamesian themes of Americans abroad, innocence versus experience, and the grip of fate. As Elizabeth Hardwick writes in her Introduction, Daisy Miller “lives on, a figure out of literature who has entered history as a name, a vision.”

The Portrait of a Lady (Modern Library Classics)

by Henry James

One of the great heroines of American literature, Isabel Archer, journeys to Europe in order to, as Henry James writes in his 1908 Preface, “affront her destiny.” James began The Portrait of a Lady without a plot or subject, only the slim but provocative notion of a young woman taking control of her fate. The result is a richly imagined study of an American heiress who turns away her suitors in an effort to first establish—and then protect—her independence. But Isabel’s pursuit of spiritual freedom collapses when she meets the captivating Gilbert Osmond. “James’s formidable powers of observation, his stance as a kind of bachelor recorder of human doings in which he is not involved,” writes Hortense Calisher, “make him a first-class documentarian, joining him to that great body of storytellers who amass what formal history cannot.”

Washington Square (Modern Library Classics)

by Henry James

Washington Square follows the coming-of-age of its plain-faced, kindhearted heroine, Catherine Sloper. Much to her father’s vexation, a handsome opportunist named Morris Townsend woos the long-suffering heiress, intent on claiming her fortune. When Catherine stubbornly refuses to call off her engagement, Dr. Sloper forces Catherine to choose between her inheritance and the only man she will ever truly love. Cynthia Ozick, in her Introduction to what she calls Henry James’s “most American fiction,” writes that “every line, every paragraph, every chapter [of Washington Square] is a fleet-footed light brigade, an engine of irony.” Precise and understated, this charming novel endures as a matchless study of New York in the mid-nineteenth century.

Washington Square (Signet Classics)

by Henry James

What Catherine Sloper lacks in brains and beauty, she makes up for by being "very good." The handsome Morris Townsend would do anything to win her hand-even if it means pretending that he loves the homely ingénue, and cares nothing for her opulent wealth.

Washington Square (Signet Classics)

by Henry James

Back when New York was still young, so was heiress Catherine Sloper. A simple, plain girl, she grew up in opulence with a disappointed father and a fluttery aunt in a grand house on Washington Square.

Enter Morris Townsend, a handsome charmer who assures Catherine he loves her for herself and not for her money. But Catherine’s revered father sees in Townsend what she cannot. Now, with her tearful aunt Penniman as his amusingly melodramatic ally, Townsend will present Catherine with the hardest choice of her young life.…

With a New Introduction and an Afterword by Michael Cunningham, Author of The Hours

The American (Signet Classics)

by Henry James

In this classic collision of the New World with Old Europe, James weaves a fable of thwarted desire that shifts between comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama.

The Portrait of a Lady (Signet Classics)

by Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady is Henry James’s classic novel featuring the strong and spirited Isabel Archer, the embodiment of women’s independence and strength.

The heroine of this powerful novel, often considered James’s greatest work, is the vivacious young American Isabel Archer. Blessed by nature and fortune, she journeys to Europe to seek the full realization of her potential—or in modern terms, “to find herself”—but what awaits her there may prove to be her undoing.

During her journey, wooers vie for her attentions, including an English aristocrat, a perfect American gentleman, and a sensitive expatriate. But it is only after the ingenue falls prey to the schemes of an infinitely sophisticated older woman that her life takes on its true form. With its brilliant interplay of tensions and characters, The Portrait of a Lady is a timeless and essential American novel.

With an Introduction by Regina Barreca
and an Afterword by Colm Tóibín

The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet Classics)

by Henry James

By turns chilling, funny, tragic, and profound, this collection of six Henry James short novels allows readers to experience the full range of his skills and vision.

The title story, “The Turn of the Screw,” is a chilling masterpiece of psychological terror that mixes the phantoms of the mind with those of the supernatural.

“Daisy Miller,” the tale of a provincial American girl in Rome that established James’s literary reputation, and “An International Episode” are superb examples of his focus on the clash between American and European values.

And in “The Aspern Papers,” “The Alter of the Dead,” and “The Beast in the Jungle,” the author’s remarkable sense of irony, his love of plot twists, and his view of male-female relationships find exquisite expression.

With an Introduction by Fred Kaplan

The Golden Bowl: Introduction by Denis Donoghue (Everyman's Library Classics Series)

by Henry James

The wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his shy daughter, Maggie, live in Europe, closely tied through their love of art and their mutual admiration. Maggie's future seems assured when she becomes the wife of a charming, though impoverished, Italian prince. But when Adam marries his daughter's friend Charlotte Stant, unaware that she is the prince's mistress, the stage is set for a complex and indirect battle between the two wives. The brilliant Charlotte is determined to keep her lover, while Maggie is determined to protect her beloved father from any knoweldge of their shared betrayal.

The acuity with which Henry James calibrates the four characters' delicately shifting alliances and documents the maturation of a naïve young woman marks this as a magnificent achievement. The Golden Bowl was not only James's last major work but also the novel in which his unparalleled gift for psychological drama reached its height.

Introduction by Denis Donoghue

Hawthorne (Cornell Paperbacks)

by Henry James

"The first extended study ever made of an American writer. It still remains one of the best."―Edmund Wilson
Originally published in 1879, Henry James's Hawthorne has been out of print for many years. Cornell University Press is proud to make this American classic available again in a new paperback edition.
In this critique of one literary genius by another, James not only considers Hawthorne as a man and a writer, for whom he has a tender, if critical, regard, but he uses his subject as a vantage point from which to present his views on American culture. With his customary urbanity, James assesses the place of the writer in nineteenth-century America, and touches upon the antithetical values of the Old World and the New.
Hawthorne's preoccupation with evil and guilt, his portentous imagination, and his otherworldliness are brought out in the critique of his works, together with James's keen appreciation of Hawthorne's remarkable gifts.

The Bostonians (Modern Library Classics)

by Henry James

This brilliant satire of the women’s rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight?

“The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James,” writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction. “It is about idealism in a democracy that is still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals . . . [written] with a ferocious, precise, detailed—and wildly comic—realism.”

Henry James : Novels 1871-1880: Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Confidence (Library of America)

by Henry James

Here is an immensely engaging introduction to one of the great novelists of our own or any country, the first volume in the Library of America edition of Henry James's complete works.

James’s first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), written when he was only 28, is a Pygmalion-type story in which a proper Bostonian gentleman grows to love and eventually marry the much younger woman whose guardian he is.

Roderick Hudson (1875) is a novel about a headstrong and proud young American sculptor of generous native talent who loses his way among the entanglements and temptations of Italy.

The American (1877) was written in Paris and is filled with scenes of Parisian life, the expatriate culture of American tourists, and the closed and protective world behind the barriers of old families and traditions.

In The Europeans (1878) a pristine, conservative, 1830s New England village is invaded by two visiting cousins, brother and sister, from the European branch of one of the town’s leading families.

Confidence (1880), a little-known and charming novel of American expatriates traveling through the great cities and watering-places of Europe, is a light drawing-room comedy about the romantic entanglements among two old friends and the two very different women they encounter.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Jack Falls

by Henry James

Jack Falls [Sep 16, 2009] Tanter, Paul and Alvarado, Oscar …

Travels with Henry James

by Henry James

"To travel with James in these pages is to take an unhurried vacation with a thoroughly seasoned, supremely cultivated, acutely intelligent companion. Our guide is a curious, engaged observer not only of landscapes and streets and cathedrals but also of paintings and plays and the characteristics -- national, social, and individual -- of the people we encounter at his side. This is a book to be read slowly, the better to absorb its sights and sounds, its insights and reflections." -- from the foreword by Hendrik Hertzberg

Brimming with charm, wit, and biting criticism, this new collection of travel essays reintroduces Henry James as a formidable travel companion. Whether for a trip to Lake George or an afternoon visit to an art exhibit in Paris, James will delight readers with his insights and make them feel nostalgic for places they've never been.

Henry James: Autobiographies (LOA #274): A Small Boy and Others / Notes of a Son and Brother / The Middle Years / Other Writings (Library of America Collected Nonfiction of Henry James)

by Henry James

This extensive collection of autobiographical writings by the author of The Turn of the Screw and The Portrait of a Lady offers a revelatory self-portrait and an inside glimpse into his famous family

In 1911, deeply affected by the death of his brother William the year before, Henry James began working on a book about his early life. As was customary for James in his later years, he dictated his recollections to his secretary Theodora Bosanquet, who recalled how “a straight dive into the past brought to the surface treasure after treasure.” A Small Boy and Others (1913) and the two autobiographical books that followed—Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and the incomplete, posthumously published The Middle Years—stand with his later novels as one of the enduring triumphs of his final years.

Not only did James create one of the singular self-portraits in American literature, he also fashioned a richly detailed account of his renowned family, especially his father, the social philosopher Henry James Sr., his brother William, and his dear cousin Minny Temple, inspiration for the heroines of two of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. Rounding out the volume is a selection of eight other personal reminiscences and, as an appendix, his secretary’s insightful and affectionate memoir, “Henry James at Work.”

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Golden Bowl

by Henry James

James, Henry

On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays

by Henry James

A new selection of Henry James's essays on the art of writing, from his famous essay "The Art of Fiction" to pieces on George Eliot, Ivan Turgenev, Honoré de Balzac, and others. Witty, erudite, and passionate, James's essays are a delight for any lover of the written word.

Best known as a master novelist, Henry James was also an incisive critic whose essays on the novel had as profound an influence on its development as did his fiction. Here, Pulitzer-finalist Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, gathers some of the most virtuosic essays from across fifty years of James’s career. From his landmark essay “The Art of Fiction,” an exhilarating treatise on the complexity of literary form, to “The Lesson of Balzac,” a tender portrait of one of James’s greatest touchstones, to career-defining assessments of writers such as George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev, James reveals himself as a passionate and sensitive reader, one whose unerring ability to locate the currents within Anglophone literature was matched only by his uncommon prescience regarding its future. Slyly humorous and unabashedly opinionated, On Writers and Writing is a compelling artistic biography of a writer at his cogent and stylish best.

Henry James: Complete Stories 1898-1910 (Library of America)

by Henry James

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. The rest is the madness of art.” These words, spoken by a dying novelist in “The Middle Years,” sum up Henry James’s credo as a writer. In more than one hundred stories, ranging from brief anecdotes to richly developed novellas, James displayed the unwavering intensity of his aesthetic vision—and he did so with an astonishing variety of invention. The Library of America makes this body of writing available in its entirety in a new, authoritative edition of James’s world-famous stories, complete in five volumes.

The thirty-one stories presented here are the culmination of James’s glorious final period. Among them are the extraordinary fantasies “The Great Good Place” and “The Jolly Corner,” in which supernatural motifs are used hauntingly to express undercurrents of yearning and dislocation; “Julia Bride,” a character portrait akin to “Daisy Miller,” in which a young American woman experiences the social pleasures and vicissitudes of the marriage market; “Crapy Cornelia,” a story whose sense of the compelling power of nostalgic memory owes much to James’s 1904 return visit to New York City; “The Birthplace,” a comic tale about the commercialization of genius that has lost none of its satiric edge; “The Tree of Knowledge,” a sly dissection of the family life of a pampered sculptor; “The Beast in the Jungle,” one of James’s masterpieces, the harrowing account of a man’s confrontation with his own lost opportunities that has been seen as foreshadowing many of the dominant themes of twentieth-century literature; and “A Round of Visits,” James’s last story, about the need to confide and the limits of sympathy.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James: Complete Stories, 1892-1898 (Library of America)

by Henry James, John Hollander

This Library of America volume is one of five that make available for the first time in new, complete, and authoritative editions the astonishing abundance of invention and unwavering intensity of the aesthetic vision of Henry James as displayed in more than one hundred world-famous stories ranging from brief anecdotes to richly developed novellas.

Equally adept at ironic comedy, muted tragedy, and supernatural fantasy, at lively social satire and nuanced portraiture, James in his shorter works explores a staggering variety of situations and emotions. Here are courtships and legacies; the worlds of literature, theater, and the popular press; the paradoxes of temperament and the constraints of custom; the clash of conscience and desire. Stylistically, the stories allowed James to experiment with tones and devices quite different from his novels—dramatic plot twists and surprise endings, swift pacing and ebullient humor. The brilliance of his technical command allowed him to transform the tiniest of suggestions—a fleetingly observed gesture, an anecdote dropped at a dinner party—into fiction remarkable for its lambent surfaces and intricate psychological counterpoint.

The twenty-one stories in this volume represent James at the peak of his storytelling powers. Among them are “The Turn of the Screw,” one of his most popular works, and a terrifying exercise in psychological horror centering on the corruption of childhood innocence; “The Real Thing,” a playful consideration of the illusion of art and the paradoxes of authenticity; “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Middle Years,” three very different expositions of the mysteries of authorship, embodying some of James’s most profound insights into the nature of his own art; “The Altar of the Dead,” a somber, ultimately wrenching meditation on the relation of the living to the dead; and “In the Cage,” an extended evocation of the inner life of a young woman trapped in a dehumanizing job at a postal-and-telegraph office.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Turn Of The Screw

by Henry James

Chiltern Publishing creates the most beautiful editions of the World’s finest literature. Your favorite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make these titles feel extra special and will look striking on any shelf.

The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a young governess who is sent to Bly, a large country estate, to care for two children. She has strict instructions from their guardian never to write to him, never to ask about the history of the house, and never to abandon the children. It isn’t long before the Governess starts to see apparitions around the grounds. When she describes the sightings, they are identified by the housekeeper as the previous governess Miss Jessel and former valet Peter Quint, who both died not long ago. As the children’s behavior grows increasingly strange, the Governess becomes convinced that these ghosts have returned to claim Miles and Flora and vows to protect them. But are the phantoms real, or is it all in the Governess' imagination?

Henry James: Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces

Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel.

James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Ivory Tower (New York Review Books Classics 2004)

by Henry James

In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of America’s Gilded Age. After an absence of more than twenty years, James had returned for a visit to his native country; what he found there filled him with profound dismay. In The Ivory Tower, his last book, the characteristic pattern underlying so much of his fiction—in which American “innocence” is transformed by its encounter with European “experience”—receives a new twist: raised abroad, the hero comes home to America to confront, as James puts it, “the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.”

James died in 1916 with the first three books of The Ivory Tower completed. He also left behind a “treatment,” in which he charted the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario, one of only two to survive among James’s papers, is also published here together with a striking critical essay by Ezra Pound.

Henry James: Literary Criticism French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition

by Henry James

Henry James, renowned as one of the world’s great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume is one of two volumes of the most extensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, with many pieces never before available in book form. It includes reviews of a great number of European writers, especially French writers, along with more general essays and the Prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works, published between 1907 and 1909.

More than one hundred reviews and essays are gathered by author, so that readers can trace the development of James’s complex, meditative, and highly volatile attitudes toward a wide spectrum of literature. James reviews the formidable Honoré de Balzac (with his “huge, all compassing, all desiring, all devouring love of reality”), Gustave Flaubert (“a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word”), and Ivan Turgenev, the Russian visitor in Paris, with whom James felt great personal affinity, even though Tugenev “lacked the immense charm of absorbed inventiveness.”

James delivers his critical judgments with great elegance and point, especially when he discusses the performance of other critics like Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and, of course, he can be wonderfully acerbic. An early moralistic essay on Baudelaire finds Poe “vastly the greater charlatan of the two, and the greater genius.”

James brings his critical zest, exhilaration, and independence of judgment to bear on writers as diverse as Alphonse Daudet, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, J. W. von Goethe, and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Readers will find, in the complete collection of the Prefaces, one of literature’s most revealing artistic autobiographies, a wholly absorbing account of how writing gets written, and a vision of the possibilities for fiction which critics and novelists of later times will find immensely instructive and liberating.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Other House (New York Review Books Classics)

by Henry James

This terse and startling novel, written just before The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew,is the story of a struggle for possession—and of its devastating consequences. Three women seek to secure the affections of one man, while he, in turn, tries to satisfy them all. But in the middle of this contest of wills stands his unwitting and vulnerable young daughter. The savage conclusion of The Other House makes it one of the most disturbing and memorable of Henry James's depictions of the uncontrollable passions that lie beneath the polished veneer of civilized life.

Oh blest Other House, which gives me thus at every step a precedent, a divine little light to walk by... —Henry James

The New York Stories of Henry James (New York Review Books Classics)

by Henry James

Henry James led a wandering life, which took him far from his native shores, but he continued to think of New York City, where his family had settled for several years during his childhood, as his hometown. Here Colm Tóibín, the author of the Man Booker Prize–shortlisted novel The Master, a portrait of Henry James, brings together for the first time all the stories that James set in New York City. Written over the course of James's career and ranging from the deliciously tart comedy of the early "An International Episode" to the surreal and haunted corridors of "The Jolly Corner," and including "Washington Square", the poignant novella considered by many (though not, as it happens, by the author himself) to be one of James's finest achievements, the nine fictions gathered here reflect James's varied talents and interests as well as the deep and abiding preoccupations of his imagination. And throughout the book, as Tóibín's fascinating introduction demonstrates, we see James struggling to make sense of a city in whose rapidly changing outlines he discerned both much that he remembered and held dear as well as everything about America and its future that he dreaded most.

Stories included:
The Story of a Masterpiece
A Most Extraordinary Case
Crawford's Consistency
An International Episode
The Impressions of a Cousin
The Jolly Corner
Washington Square
Crapy Cornelia
A Round of Visits

The Spoils of Poynton (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Mrs Gereth is convinced that Fleda Vetch would make the perfect daughter-in-law. Only the dreamy, highly-strung young woman can genuinely appreciate, and perhaps eventually share, Mrs Gereth's passion for her 'things' - the antique treasures she has amassed at Poynton Park in the south of England. Owen Gereth, however, has inconveniently become engaged to the uncultured Mona Brigstock. As a dramatic family quarrel unfolds, the hesitating Fleda is drawn in, yet she remains reluctant to captivate Owen, who seems as attracted to her as she is to him. Is she motivated by scruple or fear? In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), Henry James created a work of exquisite ambiguity in his depiction of three women fighting for the allegiance of one weak-willed man.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

The stories in this collection were written mostly between 1888 and 1897, a time when Henry James’s writing was concerned with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society. The motif and title story, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, is an inspired joke, a masterpiece of double-entendre that demands the reader’s undivided love and attention and continues to baffle its critics. Also included are ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, an absorbing story of family infighting, authorship and tragedy, and ‘The Private Life’, a spirited tale that considers the contrast between the artist alone and at work. While many of these stories appear to be elaborate Jamesian games, all employ irony and humour to allegorize artistic creation.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The American Scene (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

After living abroad for 20 years, Henry James returned to his native America and travelled down the East Coast from Boston to Florida. This a journal describing his feelings on the rediscovery of the New York of his childhood, and the growth of modern commercial America. He muses on Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson; in Washington, he finds a cityscape devoid of spiritual symbols; in Richmond, thoughts of the civil war haunt him. Published in 1907, this journal also served as a farewell address to the country James would never live in again.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Roderick Hudson (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

When wealthy Rowland Mallet first sees a sculpture by Roderick Hudson, he is astounded and pronounces it to be a work of genius, and is equally entranced by the sculptor's beauty, spirit and charisma. Wishing to give the impoverished artist the opportunity to develop his talent, he takes Roderick from America to Rome, where he becomes the talk of the city. But Roderick soon loses his inspiration and Rowland loses control of his protégé, while both fall in love with women they cannot ever have. Can Roderick be saved from the path to self-destruction he seems set on? One of Henry James's first novels, Roderick Hudson (1875) is a compelling depiction of the artistic temperament and of a young man who, like Icarus, flies too close to the sun.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Bostonians (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

‘There was nothing weak about Miss Olive, she was a fighting woman, and she would fight him to the death’

Basil Ransom, an attractive young Mississippi lawyer, is on a visit to his cousin Olive, a wealthy feminist, in Boston when he accompanies her to a meeting on the subject of women’s emancipation. One of the speakers is Verena Tarrant, and although he disapproves of all she claims to stand for, Basil is immediately captivated by her and sets about ‘reforming’ her with his traditional views. But Olive has already made Verena her protégée, and soon a battle is under way for exclusive possession of her heart and mind. The Bostonians is one of James’s most provocative and astute portrayals of a world caught between old values and the lure of progress.
Richard Lansdown’s introduction discusses The Bostonians as James’s most successful political work and his funniest novel. This edition contains extracts from Tocqueville and from James’s ‘The American Scene’, which illuminate the novel’s social context. There are also notes and a bibliography.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Selected Tales (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Throughout his life, Henry James was drawn to the short story form for the freedom and variety it offered. The nineteen stories in this selection span James's career, from brief tales to longer works, all exploring his concerns with the old world and the new, money, fame and art. 'Daisy Miller', the work that first brought him fame, depicts a bold, unsophisticated American girl abroad, and 'In the Cage' portrays a young telegraphist's romantic fantasies about customers who send telegrams from her post office. In 'The Birthplace' a Stratford tour guide embellishes the Shakespeare legend, while in the late masterpiece 'The Jolly Corner', an elderly American returns from Europe and encounters a strange apparition. Haunting, witty and beautifully drawn, James's tales are as complex and resonant as his novels.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Awkward Age

by Henry James

Nanda Brookenham is 'coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle that has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Light and ironic in its touch, The Awkward Age nevertheless analyzes the English character with great subtlety.
The Awkward Age, which has been much praised for its natural dialogue and the delicacy of feeling it conveys, exemplifies Conrad's remark that James 'is never in deep gloom or in violent sunshine. But he feels deeply and vividly every delicate shade.'

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Italian Hours (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

"The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it." —Henry James

In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James's enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe. John Auchard's lively introduction and extensive notes illuminate the surprising differences between the historical, political, and artistic Italy of James's travels and the metaphoric Italy that became the setting of some of his best-known works of fiction. This edition includes an appendix of James's book reviews on Italian travel-writing.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The American (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes' past, he confronts a moral dilemma: Should he expose them and thus gain his revenge? James's masterly early work is at once a social comedy, a melodramatic romance and a realistic novel of manners.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Turn of the Screw and the Aspern Papers (Penguin Classics)

by Henry James

In these two chilling stories, Henry James shows himself to be a master of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension. The Turn of the Screw tells of a young governess sent to a country home to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil within the house, she soon becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care. Obsession of a more worldly variety lies at the heart of The Aspern Papers, the tale of a literary historian determined to get his hands on some letters written by a great poet-and prepared to use trickery and deception to achieve his aims.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Turn of the Screw: and Owen Wingrave (Macmillan Collector's Library)

by Henry James

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

A young governess is employed to look after two orphaned children in a grand country house. Isolated and inexperienced, she is at first charmed by her young charges but gradually she suspects that they may not be as innocent as they seem. And do the sinister figures that she sees at the window exist only in her imagination or are they ghosts intent on a terrible and devastating task? The Turn of the Screw is one of the most famous and eerily equivocal ghost stories ever written.

Owen Wingrave is the story of the son of a long line of military heroes who refuses to follow tradition, yet proves his bravery in a haunted room.

This Macmillan Collector’s Library edition features an afterword by award winning novelist, Kate Mosse.

Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro (Pushkin Collection)

by Henry James

The novelist Henry James arrived in Venice as a tourist, and instantly fell in love with the city - particularly with the splendid Palazzo Barbaro, home of the expatriate American Curtis family. Edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, the selection of letters in Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro covers the period 1869-1907 and provides a unique record of the life and work of this great writer. This volume includes historical photographs and a foreword by Leon Edel, Henry James's biographer.

The novelist Henry James (1843-1916) is one of the most prominent figures of American and British Literature. Son of a clergyman, and brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James, he moved between America and Europe during his early life, eventually settling in England at the age of twenty. A prolific novelist, essayist and literary critic, James was much concerned with questions of identity, belonging, creativity and consciousness. He is perhaps most famous for his novels The Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller and What Maisie Knew, and for his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. Between 1906 and 1910, James revised much of his fiction for the so-called New York Edition of his complete works, adding now-famous Prefaces. In 1915, prompted by the First World War, he became a British citizen; he received the Order of Merit in 1916, shortly before his death.

What Maisie Knew (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

What Maisie Knew (1897) represents one of James's finest reflections on the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge, and the question of their finality. The child of violently divorced parents, Maisie Farange opens her eyes on a distinctly modern world. Mothers and fathers keep changing their partners and names, while she herself becomes the pretext for all sorts of adult sexual intrigue.

In this classic tale of the death of childhood, there is a savage comedy that owes much to Dickens. But for his portrayal of the child's capacity for intelligent `wonder', James summons all the subtlety he devotes elsewhere to his most celebrated adult protagonists. Neglected and exploited by everyone around her, Maisie inspires James to dwell with extraordinary acuteness on the things that may pass between adult and child. In addition to a new introduction, this edition of the novel offers particularly detailed notes, bibliography, and a list of variant readings.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Daisy Miller and An International Episode (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James, Adrian Poole

"An inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence"

This unique edition reunites two tales which James intended to be complementary --"Daisy Miller" and "An International Episode." Young Daisy Miller perplexes, amuses, and charms her stiff but susceptible fellow-American, Frederick Winterbourne. Is she innocent or corrupt? Has he lived too long in Europe to judge her properly? Amid the romantic scenery of Lake Geneva and Rome, their lively, precarious relationship develops to a climax in the Coliseum at midnight. The tale gave James his first popular success, yet some compatriots detected treachery in its portrayal of young American womanhood. James responded with "An International Episode," which exposes a couple of English gentlemen to the charm and wit of American sisters in Newport, Rhode Island and then in London.

Read together, these two short masterpieces shed light on each other, demonstrating the range of James's own manners, from sharp satire and buoyant comedy to complex, perhaps even tragic, pathos. Adrian Poole's superb introduction explores James's ironic portrayal of the frictions, negotiations and potential alliances sparked by the new transatlantic world in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Poole also provides informative notes as well as an appendix on stage and film versions of "Daisy Miller." This volume reproduces the definitive New York edition texts.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Bostonians (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

From Boston's social underworld emerges Verena Tarrant, a girl with extraordinary oratorical gifts, which she deploys in tawdry meeting-houses on behalf of 'the sisterhood of women.' She acquires two admirers of a very different stamp: Olive Chancellor, devotee of radical causes, and marked out for tragedy; and Basil Ransom, veteran of the Civil War, with rigid views concerning society and women's place therein. Is the lovely, lighthearted Verena made for public movements or private passions? A struggle to possess her, body and soul, develops between Olive and Basil.

The exploitation of Verena's unregenerate innocence reflects a society whose moral and cultural values are failing to survive the new dawn of liberalism and democracy. The Bostonians (1886) was not welcomed by James's fellow countrymen, who failed to appreciate its delicacy and wit; but a century later, this book is widely regarded as James's finest American fiction, and perhaps his comic masterpiece.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Wings of the Dove (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

Confronting a Bronzino portrait in an English country house, a young American heiress comes face to face with her own predicament. For Milly Theale, who seems to have the world before her and at her feet, is fatally ill. Eager for life, eager for love, she embarks on her European adventure, warming to the admiration of her new friends Kate Croy and Merton Densher. But Merton and Kate are secretly engaged, and come to see in this angel with a thumping bank account as a solution to their own problems. For the remarkable Kate, scheming, passionate, poetic, also wants to live...

This edition of James's poignant and dramatic novel is based on the revised New York Edition. The cover pictures the Bronzino portrait which is the focus of the key scene in the book.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Henry James: Novels 1881-1886 (LOA #29) Washington Square / The Portrait of a Lady / The Bostonians

by Henry James

Written in London and Italy between 1879 and 1885, the novels in this Library of America volume portray American women confronting crises of independence and possession. Studies in the exercise of power that marks relations between sexes, classes, and cultures, they show James’s special solicitude for the young heroines who occupy the center of his fictional world.

Washington Square (1880) examines the life of Catherine Sloper, a plain, sweet, young woman who lives imprisoned by the selfishness of those close to her: her lover, who cares only for her fortune; her aunt, who meddles for the sake of romantic intrigue; and her protective father, who repays her adoration with irony and wit. Set in the New York of the 1840s, Washington Square evokes the still-intimate city of James’s childhood while presenting a frightening moral lesson in the human consequences of manipulation and indifference.

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the story of Isabel Archer, a beautiful, idealistic, and inexperienced American woman who is made wealthy by her uncle at the instigation of her dying cousin. Surrounded by the seductive pleasures of nineteenth-century Europe, she preserves her idealism despite involvement with some who would divert her life to uses of their own—Caspar Goodwood, virile American captain of industry; Lord Warburton, scion of British aristocracy; Gilbert Osmond, connoisseur and collector of beautiful objects; Madame Merle, subtle and charming expatriate of unknown connections; and indomitable Henrietta Stackpole, roving journalist and steadfast friend. James’s many-layered masterpiece concerns the perilous American pursuit of individual freedom.

The Bostonians (1886) presents an unusual contest for the affections of Verena Tarrant, the lovely, naïve, and pliant daughter of a mesmerist lecturer. She is courted by two cousins: Basil Ransom, an impractical Mississippi landowner now pursuing a meager New York legal practice, and Olive Chancellor, a rich young Boston feminist. Against the richly textured backdrop of Boston and New York society, they enact a drama of confused identity and willful calculation that demonstrates the power and the perils engendered by the refusal of self-knowledge.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Complete Stories, 1874-1884

by Henry James

In the years when he achieved his greatest success as a novelist, Henry James was also contributing stories prolifically to popular magazines. Stories collected in this Library of America volume (the second of five volumes of James's stories) show James working out, in a more concise fictional laboratory, themes that appear in such novels of the period as The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians. They include some of his most famous explorations of the international theme: "Daisy Miller," the unforgettable portrayal of an innocent, headstrong American girl at odds with European mores, "An International Episode" and "Lady Barberina," satirically probing tales of English aristocrats and the American marriage market, and "The Siege of London," in which an American widow strives to work her way into English society.

In "A Bundle of Letters" and "The Point of View," James makes a fascinating experimental use of the epistolary form. "Professor Fargo" presents an unusually bleak view of the darker side of American life, while "The Author of 'Beltraffio'" offers a disturbing portrait of a fin-de-siècle novelist. Throughout, James wittily limns the demands and hidden struggles of social life, and hones his mastery of the unexpected resolution and the brilliantly framed moral portrait.

Adventurous in narrative technique, yet marked by precise observation rendered in quicksilver prose, the stories of James's middle period present a breathtaking array of memorable characters and beguiling scenarios.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James: Novels, 1903-1911- The Ambassadors / The Golden Bowl / The Outcry (Library of America, No. 215)

by Henry James

Nearly thirty years in the making, The Library of America's eleven-volume edition of the complete fiction of Henry James now culminates with this authoritative volume collecting his final three finished works. Considered by James to be his most finely constructed novel, The Ambassadors (1903) recounts the attempts of a conscientious American to convince the son of a friend to return home from Paris-and in doing so plays the charm of the Old World against the provincialism of the New. In The Golden Bowl (1904), an American woman marries an Italian prince while her father unknowingly marries the prince's former mistress; James underscores both the fragility and strength of human ties and further develops what he once called the "complex fate, being an American." Originally written for the stage but never produced, James reworked The Outcry (1911) into a highly successful comic novel of social manners that also deals with the ethics of art collecting. Included as an appendix is "The Married Son," the chapter James contributed to The Whole Family (1908), a multi-author novel conceived by William Dean Howells and portraying a dysfunctional family whose struggles mirror the frustrated collaborative efforts of the book's twelve contributors.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James: Complete Stories Vol. 1 1864-1874 (LOA #111) (Library of America Complete Stories of Henry James)

by Henry James

“A dignified and impressive addition to your bookshelf that reveals James’s virtuoso performance in a genre he helped to define, refine and elevate.” — The Commercial Appeal

This Library of America volume, the first of five of Henry James’s short fiction, brings together his first twenty-four published stories, thirteen never collected by James.

Encompassing a wide range of subjects, settings, and formal techniques, they show the first explorations of some of James’s most significant themes: the force of social convention and the compromises it demands; the complex and often ambiguous encounter between Europe and America; the energies of passion measured against the rigors of artistic discipline.

By his mid-twenties, James was a regular contributor to the most prestigious and popular magazines of his era. He is equally at ease writing historical tales, such as “Gabrielle de Bergerac,” a love story set in pre-Revolutionary France, as he is exploring contemporary events, as in the three stories that treat the effects of the American Civil War on civilians.

James’s psychological acuity is already evident in “Master Eustace,” a study of the ruthlessness of a spoiled child, and in “Guest’s Confession,” where the comic portrayal of an arrogant businessman hints at his cruelty and self-absorption. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” and “The Last of the Valerii,” James begins to work with the supernatural and fantastic motifs that would continue to surface in his work. Early examples of James’s lifelong fascination with art and artists include “A Landscape Painter,” about a young painter’s attraction to a seemingly simple family living in a desolate coastal town, and “The Madonna of the Future,” where an aging artist avoids the unveiling of his masterpiece.

Adumbrating later triumphs and compelling in their own right, these stories reveal and accomplished and cosmopolitan young talent mastering the art of the short story.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James : Complete Stories 1884-1891 (Library of America)

by Henry James

Sometimes overshadowed by his work as a novelist, Henry James’s short fiction is an astonishing achievement, a triumph of inventiveness and restless curiosity. This Library of America volume (the third of five volumes devoted to his short fiction) includes among its seventeen stories some of James’s greatest masterpieces.

“The Aspern Papers” is a stunning novella about emotional ruthlessness in the service of literary scholarship. “The Pupil” is a densely suggestive account of the moral perplexities underlying the relationship between an impoverished tutor and a young invalid. “The Lesson of the Master” is an intricate study of ambition, disappointment, and the demands of a life devoted to art. “Brooksmith” is a moving portrait of a house servant and “Sir Edmund Orme” is an enthralling ghost story.

In “The Liar,” a painter attempts to force a former love to admit that her present husband is a pathological liar; in “The Patagonia,” a young man cavalierly flirts with a young woman en route to her wedding in England, with disastrous consequences.

More than half the stories within this volume are available in no other edition.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James : Novels 1886-1890: The Princess Casamassima, The Reverberator, The Tragic Muse (Library of America)

by Henry James

The three novels in this Library of America volume from Henry James’s middle period explore some historical and social dilemmas that belong as much to our time as to his own. The Princess Casamassima was published in 1886, a year that saw riots of the unemployed in London. It is a political novel in which anarchists and terrorists conspire within a fin de siècle world of opulence and glamour. The action ranges from palaces to slums, from London to Paris to Venice and back again. The novel’s hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is torn between his loyalty to revolutionary causes—for which he is about to commit an act of violence that may cost him his life—and his taste for the artistic side of aristocratic culture, represented in part by the beautiful, wealthy, compassionate, and yet deceptive Princess of the title. Possibly to save Hyacinth, she becomes romantically involved with his fellow conspirator Paul Muniment, a calculating political operative, idealistic and treacherous by turns. Assassination plots, sexual betrayals, murder, suicide, and the fierce play of conflicting loyalties—all these bring into play an intricate abundance of attendant figures, like the rakish Captain Sholto and the appealing but faithless Millicent Henning.

The Reverberator (1888) is a swiftly paced comic novel named after a newspaper that caters to the American public’s appetite for the “society news of every quarter of the globe.” Francie Dosson, the free-spirited daughter of a wealthy Boston family, innocently provides gossip to George Flack, a “young commercial American” who writes for the paper. His published report imperils her engagement to Gaston Probert, whose family is outraged by the airing of its secrets. James portrays the collision of easily shocked Old World propriety and self-assured New World naiveté with benevolent affection and spirited delight.

The Tragic Muse (1890) explores with a topical realism not usually found in James the conflicts between art and politics, society and the Bohemian life. It does so with dazzling glimpses of Parisian theater and of London aestheticism, as articulated by the flamboyant and idealistic Gabriel Nash. At its center are four superbly drawn characters. The fascinating Miriam Rooth is an actress of overwhelming egotistic vitality and dedication to her art. Her suitor, the diplomat Peter Sherringham, is impassioned by her theatrical talent even while asking her to sacrifice it for his career. Nick Dormer faces a similar predicament in his engagement to the rich Julia Dallow, who wants him to forgo his painting so as to make use of her fortune in pursuit of his career in Parliament. Full of witty talk and vividly dramatic scenes, the novel includes a vast array of characters such as the impressive political matriarch Lady Dormer. Perhaps more than any of his novels, it attests to James’s recognition of the costs of any dedication, like his own, to creative achievement.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James: Novels 1896-1899 (LOA #139) The Other House / The Spoils of Poynton / What Maisie Knew / The Awkward Age

by Henry James

This Library of America volume collects four novels written by Henry James in the period immediately following his unsuccessful five-year-long attempt to establish himself as a playwright on the London stage. Hoping to convert his “infinite little loss” into “infinite little gain,” James returned to the novelistic examination of English society with a new appreciation for what he called the “divine principle of the Scenario,” “a key that, working in the same general way fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock.”

His continued interest in dramatic form is demonstrated in The Other House (1896), which was derived from the scenario for a three-act play. Set in two neighboring houses and told mostly through dialogue, the novel explores the violent and tragic consequences of jealousy and frustrated passion. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), one of the most tightly constructed of James’s late novels, a house and its exquisite antique furnishings and artwork become the source of a protracted struggle involving the proud and imperious Mrs. Gereth, her amiable son, Owen, his philistine fiancée, Mona Brigstock, and the sensitive Fleda Vetch, whose moral judgment is tested by her conflicting allegiances.

What Maisie Knew (1897) explores with perception and sensitivity the effect upon a young girl of her parents’ bitter divorce and their subsequent remarriages. In writing the novel James chose as his point of view what he described as “the consciousness, the dim, sweet, scared, wondering, clinging perception of the child.” The Awkward Age (1899) examines the complicated relations among the members of a sophisticated London social circle almost entirely through dialogue as it depicts the shifting marital prospects of a young woman poised on the verge of adult life. Both of these novels insightfully explore the ambiguity of childhood “innocence” amid adult struggles over money, power, and love.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

Henry James is one of the giants of American literary history. From the novella "Daisy Miller" and classic short stories such as "The Turn of the Screw" to the popular short novel Washington Square and intricately woven and highly complex later novels such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors, James's work is a required stop on any journey through our nation's artistic and cultural heritage.
An undisputed masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady is arguably James's most popular work, and certainly the finest of his early novels. It focuses on Isabel Archer, a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a "house of suffocation."
Portrait of a Lady is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late. This new edition includes helpful notes on the numerous changes James made between the first edition and the revised New York Edition, reproduced here, an up-to-date bibliography, and a new chronology.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Notebooks of Henry James

by Henry James

"For other novelists the value of Henry James's Notebooks is immense and to brood over them a major experience. The glow of the great impresario is on the pages. They are occasionally readable and endlessly stimulating, often moving and are ocasionally relieved by a drop of gossip."—V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman

"The Notebooks take us into his study, and here we can observe him, at last, in the very act of creation at his writing table."—Leon Edel, Atlantic Monthly

"A document of prime importance."—Edmund Wilson, New Yorker

The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

Emerging from the grit and stigma of poverty to a life of fairytale privilege under the wing of her aunt, the beautiful and financially ambitious Kate Croy is already romantically involved with promising journalist Merton Densher when they become acquainted with Milly Theale, a New York socialite of immense wealth. Learning of Milly's mortal illness and passionate attraction to Densher, Kate sets the scene for a romantic betrayal intended to secure her lasting financial security. As the dying Milly retreats within the carnival splendour of a Venetian palazzo, becoming the frail hub of a predatory circle of fortune-seekers, James unfolds a resonant, brooding tale of doomed passion, betrayal, human resilience and remorse.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Ambassadors: Introduction by Sarah Churchwell (Everyman's Library Classics Series)

by Henry James

A new Everyman's Library hardcover edition of The Ambassadors--one of the great masterpieces of Henry James’s late period, and the author’s own favorite among his works.

First published in 1903, the novel follows middle-aged Lambert Strether as he is dispatched from Massachusetts to Paris by his wealthy fiancée to rescue her son, Chad Newsome, from the corrupting influences of Europe and its wicked women. Once the mild-mannered and inexperienced Strether arrives in Paris, however, Chad introduces him to a world that he finds refined and sophisticated, rather than debauched and base. Mrs. Newsome, waiting in Massachusetts, grows impatient and sends more ambassadors to retrieve her wayward men. But Strether has become especially enchanted by Chad’s female friends Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne, and he begins to wonder if, all his life, he has missed out on what the wider world has to offer. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” he tells a friend in one of the most memorable scenes in this darkly comic, masterfully written story of liberation, self-discovery, and the meaning of living well.

Daisy Miller and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

The tale of Daisy's irruption into staid European society enjoyed, as did Daisy herself, a succès de scandale; and it has remained one of Jamess most popular short stories. Like the others collected here--'Pandora,' 'The Patagonia,' and 'Four Meetings'-- it describes a confrontation between different values in a changing world. Is the new independent American girl enchanting in her spontaneity, alarming in her unpredictability, or merely vulnerable in her ignorance of social codes? Hung about with make admirers who seek, uncertainly, to grasp the new phenomenon, Daisy marches on undiscourageable, to her triumphant--or tragic--destiny.

This volume contains prefaces by Henry James, a chronology of his life, and editor's notes.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Ambassadors (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

The second of James's three late masterpieces, was, in its author's opinion, "the best, all round, of my productions".

Lambert Strether, a mild middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs. Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure, and to bring him home. But Strether finds Chad transformed by the influence of a remarkable woman; and as the Parisian spring advances, he himself succumbs to the allure of the 'vast bright Babylon' and to the mysterious charm of Madame de Vionnet.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The American (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

During a trip to Europe, Christopher Newman, a wealthy American businessman, asks the charming Claire de Cintré to be his wife. To his dismay, he receives an icy reception from the heads of her family, who find Newman to be a vulgar example of the American privileged class. Brilliantly combining elements of comedy, tragedy, romance and melodrama, this tale of thwarted desire vividly contrasts nineteenth-century American and European manners. Oxford's edition of The American, which was first published in 1877, is the only one that uses James' revised 1907 text.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Portrait of a Lady (Everyman's Library)

by Henry James

Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence that is at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characters with whom she is entangled--the good man and the evil one, between whom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom she must do battle--are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggests dazzling imaginative powers. And the scene painting--in England and Italy--provides a continuous visual pleasure while always remaining crucial to the larger drama.

The Portrait of a Lady is the most stunning achievement of Henry James's early period--in the 1860s and '70s when he was transforming himself from a talented young American into a resident of Europe, a citizen of the world, and one of the greatest novelists of modern times. A kind of delight at the success of this transformation informs every page of this masterpiece.

Wings Of The Dove

by Henry James

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.

The Ambassadors (Norton Critical Editions)

by Henry James

This revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition of The Ambassadors again includes the author's preface as well as the most significant variants of the three earlier editions of the novel published in James's lifetime. The importance of these variants and the conditions under which the novel was written and revised―conditions leading to the continuing controversy over the order of the chapters―are discussed in the editor's rewritten and updated essay on editions and revisions of The Ambassadors.

As often as possible, the annotations to the text have been made by referring to James's other writings.

A map of Strether's Paris and a virtually unknown photograph of James, which originally appeared with the serial of The Ambassadors, have been added to this Second Edition, and the original frontispieces to the New York Edition of the novel have been reproduced in their proper sequence for the first time.

"The Author on the Novel" contains James's notebook entries on the inspiration for The Ambassadors as well as the long, remarkable preliminary statement that the author drew up before writing his novel. The selection of James's letters on The Ambassadors has also been expanded for the Second Edition.

"Criticism" is comprised of fourteen essays that represent more than seventy years of analysis of The Ambassadors, by H. M. Alden, Percy Lubbock, E. M. Forster, F. O. Matthiessen, F. R. Leavis, Joseph Warren Beach, Joan Bennett, Leon Edel, Ian Watt, Sallie Sears, Nicola Bradbury, Maud Ellmann, Millicent Bell, and Philip Fisher.

A Chronology and an expanded Selected Bibliography are also included.

The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James, Adrian Poole

"There's no baseness I wouldn't commit for Jeffrey Aspern's sake."

The Aspern Papers is one of James's best-known and most accomplished novellas, whose plot foreshadows the modern cult of the writer as celebrity, and the hunger to uncover previously unseen writings. Indeed, in all four stories collected here--including "The Death of the Lion," "The Figure in the Carpet" and "The Birthplace"--the figure of the artist is central. Extraordinarily prophetic, James explores the emergent new cult of the writer as celebrity, and asks: can the person behind the art ever truly be known, and can our knowledge of the artist's life ever explain the act of creativity.

The collection features an Introduction by distinguished James scholar Adrian Poole, who explores the central themes of all four stories and their literary contexts. In addition, Poole includes relevant extracts from James's Prefaces and Notebooks in which the origins and development of the stories are described as well as an appendix on stage and screen versions of The Aspern Papers. Reproducing the definitive New York Edition text, the volume includes a new Select Bibliography, new and revised notes, and an appendix of variant readings.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2 (Everyman's Library)

by Henry James

Encompassing a period of almost fifty years, the stories of Henry James represent the most remarkable feat of sustained literary creation in modern times. For sheer richness, variety and intensity, they have no equal in fiction, enabling us to trace the evolution of a great writer in the finest detail. This collection reprints all the major stories together with many unfamiliar but equally intriguing pieces that illuminate their more celebrated companions.

Volume 2 takes us from “The Private Life” of 1892 to James’s last story, “A Round of Visits,” published in 1910. These are the magnificent works of James’s maturity—“The Death of the Lion,” “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “In the Cage,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and many others—in which the deepening darkness of the author’s life casts a tragic but heroic shadow on the themes of his youth.

Contents of Volume 2

The Private Life
The Real Thing
Owen Wingrave
The Middle Years
The Death of the Lion
The Coxon Fund
The Next Time
The Altar of the Dead
The Figure in the Carpet
The Turn of the Screw
In the Cage
The Real Right Thing
The Great Good Place
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie
The Abasement of the Northmores
The Special Type
The Tone of Time
The Two Faces
The Beldonald Holbein
The Story in It
Flickerbridge
The Beast in the Jungle
The Papers
Fordham Castle
Julia Bride
The Jolly Corner
Crapy Cornelia
The Bench of Desolation
A Round of Visits

Washington Square: Introduction by Arthur Phillips (Everyman's Library Classics Series)

by Henry James

Washington Square is one of Henry James’s most appealing and popular novels, with the most straightforward plot and style of any of his works.

Set in the genteel New York of James’s early childhood, it is a tale of cruelty laced with comedy. Dr. Austin Sloper is a wealthy and domineering father who is disappointed in the unremarkable daughter he has produced; he dismisses her as both plain and simpleminded. The gentle and dutiful Catherine Sloper has always been in awe of her father, but when she falls in love with Morris Townsend, a penniless charmer whom Dr. Sloper accuses of being a fortune hunter, she dares to defy him and a battle of wills ensues that will leave her forever changed. Readers have long admired the way that the innocent Catherine, misled by her meddling aunt and mistreated by both her father and her lover, grows in strength and wisdom over the course of her ordeal.

The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (Modern Library Classics)

by Henry James

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition brings together one of literature's most famous ghost stories and one of Henry James's most unusual novellas. In The Turn of the Screw, a governess is haunted by ghosts from her young charges past; Virginia Woolf said of this masterpiece of psychological ambiguity and suggestion, We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves...Henry James...can still make us afraid of the dark.

In his rarely anthologized novella In the Cage, James brings his incomparable powers of observation to the story of a clever, rebellious heroine of Britain's lower middle class. Hortense Calisher, in her Introduction, calls it a delicious story, the more so because it confounds what we expect from James.

The Wings of the Dove (Norton Critical Editions)

by Henry James

The text of this 1902 novel is again that of the fully corrected and annotated reprint of the New York Edition (1909), together with James’s preface and the two frontispieces he commissioned for the New York Edition of The Wings of the Dove. The "Textual Appendix" includes notes on the novel’s textual history and lists all substantive revisions that James made to the novel, both in 1902 and in1909. "The Author and the Novel," introduced by editorial commentary and new to the Second Edition, includes selections from James’s notebooks, letters, travel books, and autobiographical writings, which illuminate his conception and assessment of The Wings of the Dove. "Criticism" reflects the lively interpretive and theoretical writing that The Wings of the Dove has enjoyed since the previous edition was published in 1978. Eleven essays are included, seven of them new to the Second Edition, including Anthony J. Mazzella’s piece on film adaptation. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. Illustrations, maps

The Turn of the Screw (Norton Critical Editions)

by Henry James

This text is the first-and only-modern text to follow the New York Edition, the one which had James's final authority. Contexts includes twenty-six selections, from James's letters, notebooks, and other writings during the period 1863-1908, centering on the ghost story, the supernatural and, in particular, "my little book," The Turn of the Screw. Also reproduced are four paintings by Charles Demuth. The essays in Criticism span one hundred years, providing a rich array of perspectives on James and his story. Representing contemporary reactions are pieces by Henry Harland, John D. Barry, Oliver Elton, William Lyon Phelps, and Virginia Woolf. The section also includes landmark criticism by Harold Goddard, Edna Kenton, Edmund Wilson, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert B. Heilman, R. P. Blackmur, Maurice Blanchot, and Leon Edel. Recent, fresh approaches to James's work are presented by Tzvetan Todorov, Shoshana Felman, Henry Sussman, Bruce Robbins, Ned Lukacher, Paul B. Armstrong, and T. J. Lustig. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

Collected Stories Volume 1 (Everyman's Library)

by Henry James

Encompassing a period of almost fifty years, the stories of Henry James represent the most remarkable feat of sustained literary creation in modern times. For sheer richness, variety and intensity, they have no equal in fiction, enabling us to trace the evolution of a great writer in the finest detail. This collection reprints all the major stories together with many unfamiliar but equally intriguing pieces that illuminate their more celebrated companions.

Volume 1 covers the period from 1866 to 1891, the years in which James was evolving and perfecting his art as a storyteller. It includes such well-known masterpieces as “Daisy Miller,” ‘The Aspern Papers,” “The Siege of London,” and “The Lesson of the Master,” and many other tales in which James established his favorite characters and situations: the American girl in Europe, the solitary observer, the social climber, the literary lion.

Contents of Volume 1

A Landscape-Painter
A Light Man
A Passionate Pilgrim
The Madonna of the Future
Madame de Mauves
Benvolio
Daisy Miller: A Study
An International Episode
The Pension Beaurepas
The Point of View
The Siege of London
Lady Barberina
The Author of "Beltraffio"
Louisa Pallant
The Aspern Papers
The Liar
The Lesson of the Master
The Patagonia
The Pupil
The Marriages
The Chaperon
Sir Edmund Orme

The Portrait of a Lady (Norton Critical Editions)

by Henry James

The text of this Second Edition of one of Henry James's most important novels is that of the New York Edition (1908). In a sense, there are two distinctly separate Portraits―the 1880-81 First Edition and the New York Edition, which James extensively revised. The editor has meticulously prepared a list of textual variants to facilitate comparative reading of the novel. Nina Baym, F. O. Matthiessen, and Anthony J. Mazzella provide differing interpretations of James's revision process.

Henry James and the Novel culls autobiographical excerpts from James's other writings―his Notebooks, the intentionally autobiographical A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, and the travel books Italy Revisited, A Roman Holiday, and Roman Rides.

Contemporary Reviews and Criticism provides both chronological and critical perspective on The Portrait of a Lady. Four reviews from 1882 outline the novel's initial critical reception.

Seven important essays from the period 1954-1991 provide a wide range of critical responses by Dorothy Van Ghent, William H. Gass, Laurence B. Holland, Charles Feidelson, Louis Auchincloss, William Veeder, and Millicent Bell.

Bibliographical Aids includes judiciously selected secondary works on James from the wealth of material published yearly.

Daisy Miller (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

by Henry James

Daisy Miller is a fascinating portrait of a young woman from Schenectady, New York, who, traveling in Europe, runs afoul of the socially pretentious American expatriate community in Rome. First published in 1878, the novella brought American novelist Henry James (1843–1916), then living in London, his first international success. Like many of James' early works, it portrays a venturesome American girl in the treacherous waters of European society — a theme that would culminate in his 1881 masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady.
On the surface, Daisy Miller unfolds a simple story of a young American girl's willful yet innocent flirtation with a young Italian, and its unfortunate consequences. But throughout the narrative, James contrasts American customs and values with European manners and morals in a tale rich in psychological and social insight. A vivid portrayal of Americans abroad and a telling encounter between the values of the Old and New World, Daisy Miller is an ideal introduction to the work of one of America's greatest writers of fiction.

The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master

by Henry James

A strange and delightful memento of one of the most lasting literary voices of all time, The Daily Henry James is a little book from a great mind. First published with James’s approval in 1911 as the ultimate token of fandom—a limited edition quote-of-the-day collection titled The Henry James Year Book—this new edition is a gift across time, arriving as we mark the centenary of his death. Drawing on the Master’s novels, essays, reviews, plays, criticism, and travelogues, The Daily Henry James offers a series of impressions (for if not of impressions, of what was James fond?) to carry us through the year.

From the deepest longings of Isabel Archer to James’s insights in The Art of Fiction, longer seasonal quotes introduce each month, while concise bits of wisdom and whimsy mark each day. To take but one example: Isabel, in a quote from The Portrait of a Lady for September 30, muses, “She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.” Featuring a new foreword by James biographer Michael Gorra as well as the original introductions by James and his good friend William Dean Howells, this long-forgotten perennial calendar will be an essential bibelot for James’s most ardent devotees and newest converts alike, a treasure to be cherished daily, across all seasons, for years, for ages to come.

The Golden Bowl (Oxford World's Classics)

by Henry James

Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is the last completed novel of Henry James. In it, the widowed American Adam Verver is in Europe with his daughter Maggie. They are rich, finely appreciative of European art and culture, and deeply attached to each other. Maggie has all the innocent charm of so many of Jamess young American heroines. She is engaged to Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince; he must marry money, and as his name suggests, an American heiress is the perfect solution. The golden bowl, first seen in a London curio shop, is used emblematically throughout the novel. Not solid gold but gilded crystal, the perfect surface conceals a flaw; it is symbolic of the relationship between the main characters and of the world in which they move.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Also in Europe is an old friend of Maggies, Charlotte Stant, a girl of great charm and independence, and Maggie is blindly ignorant of the fact that she and the prince are lovers. Maggie and Amerigo are married and have a son, but Maggie remains dependent for real intimacy on her father, and she and Amerigo grow increasingly apart. Feeling that her father has suffered a loss through her marriage, Maggie decides to find him a wife, and her choice falls on Charlotte. Charlottes affair with the prince continues and Adam Verver seems to her to be a suitable and convenient match. When Maggie herself finally comes into possession of the golden bowl, the flaw is revealed to her, and, inadvertently, the truth about Amerigo and Charlotte. Fanny Assingham (an older woman, aware of the truth from the beginning) deliberately breaks the bowl, and this marks the end of Maggies innocence. She is no pathetic heroine-victim, however. Abstaining from outcry and outrage she instead takes the reins and maneuvers people and events. She still wants to be with Amerigo, but he must continue to be worth having and they must all be saved further humiliations and indignities. To be a wife she must cease to be a daughter; Adam Verver and the unhappy Charlotte are banished forever to America, and the new Maggie will establish a real marriage with Amerigo.

Daisy Miller

by Henry James

Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the charming but inscrutable young American of the title shocks European society with her casual indifference to its social mores. The novella was popular in part because of the debates it sparked about foreign travel, the behaviour of women, and cultural clashes between people of different nationalities and social classes.

This Broadview edition presents an early version of James’s best-known novella within the cultural contexts of its day. In addition to primary materials about nineteenth-century womanhood, foreign travel, medicine, philosophy, theatre, and art—some of the topics that interested James as he was writing the story—this volume includes James’s ruminations on fiction, theatre, and writing, and presents excerpts of Daisy Miller as he rewrote it for the theatre and for a much later and heavily revised edition.

The Ambassadors (Modern Library Classics)

by Henry James

Introduction by Colm Tóibín

One of the final masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest authors, Henry James’s The Ambassadors is now available for the first time in a Modern Library edition, with a new Introduction by acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín. A keenly observed tale of a man’s awakening to life, this dark comic novel follows Lewis Lambert Strether, a middle-aged widower, on a mission to Europe to convince his fiancée’s wayward son to forsake the pleasures of Paris and return to America. Rich with fin de siècle detail, The Ambassadors brims with finely drawn character portraits, including one of the Master’s most unforgettable heroines—the beguiling Madame de Vionnet. This was the novel that Henry James himself considered his finest, and no one is better equipped to put it into literary and historical context than Colm Tóibín, whose award-winning novel The Master depicted the inner life of James in the final years of the nineteenth century.

The American (Norton Critical Edition)

by Henry James

The text reprinted in this volume is based on an examination of the five printed versions of The American (first published in 1877) which appeared in James's lifetime, and it is preceded by his "Preface to the New York Edition" (1907). The textual history of the novel is traced in A Note on the Text; a list of substantive variants and emendations; a facsimile manuscript page showing James's method of revision; and a list of the installments of the novel as they appeared in The Atlantic.

"Backgrounds and Sources" includes relevant extracts from correspondence, reviews, and articles by James and others, and from his Notebooks and Hawthorne.

"Contemporary Reception" of the novel is illustrated by twenty-one American and English reviews.

"Twentieth-Century Criticism" is represented in essays by Leon Edel, Oscar Cargill, Irving Howe, Richard Poirier, Royal A. Gettmann, and James W. Tuttleton.

A Selected Bibliography is included for further study.

the_lesson_of_the_master

by Henry James

"You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"

Exemplifying Henry James's famous belief that "Art makes life," The Lesson of the Master is a piercing study of the life that art makes. When the tale's protagonist—a gifted young writer—meets and befriends a famous author he has long idolized, he is both repelled by and attracted to the artist's great secret: the emotional costs of a life dedicated to art.

With extraordinary psychological insight and devastating wit, the novella asks the question of whether art is, ultimately, demeaning or ennobling for the artist, while capturing the ambiguities of a life devoted to art, and the choices artists must make. The expatriate James knew these choice well by the time he published the novella in the Universal Review in 1888, and the work reveals him at the height of his powers.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Daisy Miller and Other Tales

by Henry James

A wonderful new collection of Henry James’s short stories about Americans in Europe

Daisy Miller is one of Henry James’s great heroines: a young, independent American traveling in Europe, whose flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to catastrophe. Her story is here accompanied by six more riffing on a classic Jamesian theme: the clash between the old world and new, Europe and America.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Coxon Fund (The Art of the Novella)

by Henry James

The greater the windbag the greater the calamity.
Henry James examines one of his favorite topics—the artist’s place in society—by profiling a “genius” who just can’t seem to support himself. A dazzling intellectual and brilliant speaker, Mr. Saltram has become the most sought-after houseguest in England. But, as his intellectual labors slacken, it beomes harder and harder to get him to leave.
A wry, edgy comedy about the fine line between making art...and freeloading. The Coxon Fund shows off a gift that is rarely appreciated about Henry James: he can be wickedly funny.
The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

English Hours: A Portrait of a Country (Tauris Parke Paperbacks)

by Henry James

Henry James left America for England in 1876 and remained in his adopted country for the next three decades. Arriving in Liverpool, he made his way first to London, the “dreadful, delightful city” that he would come to both love and hate. James reveled in the exoticism and immensity of all that was unknown to him, and his writing spills over with youthful excitement, humor, and vivid descriptions of the people, landscapes, towns, and cities he encountered. He later set out to explore the English countryside: Chester, Warwick, Devon, Wells, Salisbury, Suffolk, and Rye, where he eventually settled, bought Lamb House, and wrote prolifically—producing some of his finest works, including What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Middle Years

The Portrait of a Lady: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

by Henry James

“Michael Gorra’s wise and worldly new critical edition of James’s first masterpiece will help readers of all persuasions appreciate The Portrait of a Lady as a brilliant experiment in the art of the novel; as a landmark in the emergence of American literature; and as an open-ended, quietly terrifying meditation on American identity in its encounter with the world.” ―Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• The New York Edition of the novel, accompanied by Michael Gorra’s introduction and explanatory footnotes.
• Background and contextual materials centering on James as a writer, The Portrait of a Lady in revision, and reviews of the novel by James’s contemporaries.
• Seven important critical essays, chosen for their accessibility.
• A Chronology and Suggestions for Further Reading.

About the Series

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format―annotated text, contexts, and criticism―helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Washington Square

by Henry James

One of the most instantly appealing of James's early masterpieces, Washington Square is a tale of a trapped daughter and domineering father, a quiet tragedy of money and love and innocence betrayed. Catherine Sloper, heiress to a fortune, attracts the attention of a good-looking but penniless young man, Morris Townsend, but her father is convinced that his motives are merely mercenary. He will not consent to the marriage, regardless of the cost to his daughter. Out of this classic confrontation Henry James fashioned one of his most deftly searching shorter fictions, a tale of great depth of meaning and understanding. First published in 1880 but set some forty years earlier in a pre-Civil War New York, the novel reflects ironically on the restricted world in which its heroine is marooned. In his excellent introduction Adrian Poole reflects on the book's gestation and influences, the significance of place, and the insight with which the four principal players are drawn. The book also includes an up-to-date bibliography, illuminating notes, and a discussion of stage and film adaptations of the story.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.