Bücher von Henry James

Two terrifying ghost stories from master storyteller Henry James featuring an afterword by bestselling author Kate Mosse.

Henry James is a highly readable commentator on the theatre and performance practices of his time. Readers of this complete collection of his nonfictional writing on drama will gain fresh insights not only into British, American and French theatre and drama, but also into James's fiction and critical thinking.

Henry James was a leading commentator on the art of his time. Readers of this complete collection of his nonfictional writing on art will gain fresh insights not only into British, American and French art, but also into James's fiction and critical thinking.

Introduction by Colm TóibínOne 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.

This critical essay and biography by Henry James (1843-1916) of his fellow American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), today best remembered for The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, was published in the first 'English Men of Letters' series in 1879, and is notable for being the only volume in that series devoted to an American. It is now recognised as being one of the first critical studies of an American writer, and it remains an important work for students and admirers both of James and of Hawthorne. In his critical assessment, James, whose own writing was strongly influenced by Hawthorne, seeks to identify him not only as a great novelist, but particularly as an American novelist, rooted in the landscape, and speaking in the language, of the New World.

Written by Henry James, Portraits of Places is a record of the author's reminiscences of his travels in Italy, France, and England during 1876-1882. Beginning in Venice, James takes the reader on a journey through Italy to France (Paris, Rheims, Normandy and the Pyrenees) and England (London, Warwickshire). His finely crafted word-portraits vividly evoke the less-frequented monuments of Europe, the abbeys and castles, events and festivals, and the scenic beauty of London at different times of the year. Also included are sketches of four scenic locales in North America: Saratoga, Newport, Quebec, and Niagara. Portraits of Places is a vintage work by a famous literary figure that memorably captures scenes of cultural and historical beauty on both sides of the Atlantic, as observed by an American traveller over a period of six years.

Standing on the shore of Lake Geneva, young writer Frederick Winterbourne is drawn to Daisy Miller. As disdain about her recklessness with men resonates around the aristocratic circles, he continues to defend her, but at what cost? As an intriguing tale of passion and romance unfolds, he is confronted with a tragedy that will haunt him forever.

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.

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.

This story of the alliance between Italian aristocracy and American millionaires is "e;a work unique among all [James's] novels: it is [his] only novel in which things come out right for his characters ...he had finally resolved the questions, curious and passionate, that had kept him at his desk on his inquiries into the process of living. He could now make his peace with America and he could now collect and unify the work of a lifetime."e; Leon Edel in The Life of Henry James

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here - `Sir Edmund Orme', `Owen Wingrave', and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's `infernal imagination', which torments but also entrals her? `The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, `the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes.

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.

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.

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.

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. It is only when she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the cultivated but worthless Gilbert Osmond that she discovers that wealth is a two-edged sword and that there is a price to be paid for independence. With its subtle delineation of American characters in a European setting, Portrait of a Lady is one of the most accomplished and popular of Henry James's early novels.

Concerns the governess of two small children who thinks that her charges are being haunted by ghosts. This book illustrates the author's theory of the horror story: to suggest rather than state horror.