Henry James
21) The Path of Duty
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This wickedly ironic story is shorter than most of James's tales. It concerns three English aristocrats and an unnamed female narrator who is herself a target of the irony. Ambrose Tester is in love with Lady Vandeleur, a married woman as the story opens. Conveniently for the plot, however, her husband soon dies and Ambrose has a decision to make. Should he marry the woman he loves or Jocelind, whom he does not love but has gotten himself engaged...
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James published this work of collected literary criticism in 1914, with the individual pieces drawn from the preceding two decades. James discusses Robert Louis Stevenson, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, and others. It is on these essays, as well as the introductions to his own collected works, that James's reputation as one of the most acute literary critics of his era rests.
23) The Private Life
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Excerpt: "We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval glacier. The hour and the scene were one of those impressions which make up a little, in Switzerland, for the modern indignity of travel-the promiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregarious patience, the struggle for a scrappy attention, the reduction to a numbered state. The high valley was pink with the mountain rose, the cool air as fresh as if...
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The Golden Bowl is a 1904 novel by Henry James. Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some critics have called the "major phase" of James' career. The Golden Bowl explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail but also with...
26) The Jolly Corner
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The Jolly Corner is a short story by Henry James published first in the magazine The English Review of December, 1908. One of James' most noted ghost stories, "The Jolly Corner" describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty New York house where he grew up. He encounters a "sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."
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The Altar of the Dead Henry James - The Altar of the Dead is a short story by Henry James, first published in his collection Terminations in 1895. A fable of literally life and death significance, the story explores how the protagonist tries to keep the remembrance of his dead friends, to save them from being forgotten entirely in the rush of everyday events. He meets a woman who shares his ideals, only to find that the past places what seems to be...
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A Passionate Pilgrim is a novella by Henry James, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1871. The story was the earliest fiction that James included in the New York Edition (1907–09) of his works. Set in England, the tale shows James' strong interest in the contrast between the Old World and the New.
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American author and expatriate, Henry James is regarded as one the principal figures of 19th century literary realism. His work, which often features Americans traveling to Europe, is noted for its intimate examination of the consciousness of his characters. In this volume, we find two of his most popular works. "The Turn of the Screw" is an intense psychological tale of terror. Beginning in an old house on Christmas Eve, it is the story of a governess,...
30) The Ivory Tower
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Unfinished at the time of James's death in 1916, the Ivory Tower utilizes a classic Jamesian theme-American innocence transformed by European experience. Here, however, there's a twist: the hero was raised abroad and returns to America with its immense Gilded Age fortunes to discover the corrupting effects of wealth and possessions.
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The Death of the Lion is an 1894 short story by Henry James. The narrator suggests writing an article on Neil Paraday; his new editor agrees. The former spends a week with Neil and writes the article whilst there, alongside reading Paraday's latest book. His editor rejects the article however; he decides to write an article for another newspaper, but it goes unnoticed. Neil Paraday gets excited about writing another book, despite the fact that he...
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The Real Thing, a tale of an artist and his models, a husband and wife in impoverished conditions willing to do anything to earn their keep; "Sir Dominick Ferrand," in which struggling author Peter Baron's discovery of the secret letters of Dominick Ferrand changes his life; "Nona Vincent" -- playwright Allan Wayworth struggles to write something meaningful for the popular stage; and "Greville Fane," in which the narrator is called upon to interview...
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Though best known as a novelist, James also wrote non-fiction, including this controversial 1907 account of his 1905-06 American tour. By 1905 he had lived in England for twenty-five years, and it is as a returning expatriate that James views the country of his birth-and finds much to criticize in its embrace of crass materialism.
34) The Finer Grain
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HE thought he had already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fullness the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude, quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new literary star that had begun to hang, with a fresh red light, over the vast, even though rather confused, Anglo-Saxon horizon; positively approaching that celebrity with a...
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Henry James wrote a number of stories about art, artists, their achievements, and their reputations – both whilst alive and after their death. The Madonna of the Future is about a would be artist. Theobald has an enormous reverence for the world of Art, and Italian Renaissance painters in particular. He is well informed about the history and the technical details of what they have produced...
36) Embarrassments
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Collection of classics by Henry James. Titles include: "The Figure in the Carpet", "Glasses", "The Next Time" and "The Way It Came".
37) The Middle Years
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The Middle Years is a short story by Henry James, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1893. It may be the most affecting and profound of James's stories about writers. The novelist in the tale speculates that he has spent his whole life learning how to write, so a second life would make sense, "to apply the lesson." Second lives aren't usually available, so the novelist says of himself and his fellow artists: "We work in the dark-we do what...
39) The Coxon Fund
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"The Coxon Fund" is an 1894 short story by Henry James. Frank Saltram is a man who apparently has a towering intellect, but one that manifests itself only in sparkling table-talk. He has a real and powerful gift to delight with his conversation, particularly when intoxicated, but other than conversation he produces nothing. Saltram also recognizes no obligations or duties, is ungrateful and utterly unreliable, and is apparently prone to immoral acts....
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Partial Portraits examines the work of a range of authors, such as Emerson, Eliot, Trollope, and Stevenson. It includes one of James's most famous essays, The Art of Fiction, in which he argues that writers should not be limited in their subject matter, and that the only obligation a writer has is to make the work interesting.