Henry James

In the Aspern Papers a nameless narrator goes to Venice to find Juliana Bordereau, an old lover of Jeffrey Aspern, a famous and now dead American poet. The story is based on the letters Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Mary Shelley's step sister, Claire Clairmont, who saved them until she died....

Mississippi lawyer and Civil War veteran, Basil Ransom, visits his cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston. She takes him to a political meeting where Verena Tarrant delivers a feminist speech. Ransom, a strong conservative, is annoyed by the speech but fascinated with the speaker....

An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript telling the story of how a young governess is hired by a man who has become responsible for his young nephew and niece after the death of their parents. He lives mainly in London and is not interested in raising the children himself. The imagery of The Turn of the Screw is...

Eugenia and Felix, who since their early childhood have lived in Europe, moving from France to Italy and from Spain to Germany. In Germany, Eugenia entered into a Morganatic marriage with Prince Adolf, the younger brother of the reigning prince who is now being urged by his family to dissolve the marriage for political reasons. Because of this,...

The Ambassadors is a dark comedy, one of the masterpieces of James's final period. It follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad, his widowed fiancee's supposedly wayward son; he is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications....

Henry James had arrived at such mastery of the forms and uses of fiction by the time he published The Awkward Age in 1899 that this story ofa young girl introduced into a casually corrupt circle of sophisticates is at once a universal drama of innocence confronting evil, a detailed examination of a social order, and a stunning picture ofa...