The Golden Bowl

Henry James’s highly charged study of adultery, jealousy and possession, The Golden Bowl is edited with an introduction and notes by Ruth Bernard Yeazell in Penguin Classics.

Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, and her widowed father Adam, a billionaire collector of objets d’art, 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, a friend of his daughter. But both father and daughter are unaware that their new conquests share a secret – one for which all concerned must pay the price. Henry James’s late, great work both continues and challenges his theme of confrontation between American innocence and European experience.

This edition of The Golden Bowl contains a chronology, suggested further reading, a glossary, notes and an introduction by Ruth Bernard Yeazall discussing James’s original conception of the novel and later changes made to its structure and characters.

Henry James (1843-1916) son of a prominent theologian, and brother to the philosopher William James, was one of the most celebrated novelists of the fin-de-siècle. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, biography and autobiography, and much travel writing, he wrote some twenty novels.
His novella ‘Daisy Miller’ (1878) established him as a literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic, and his other novels in Penguin Classics include Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903).

If you enjoyed The Golden Bowl, you might like Theodor Fontaine’s Effi Briest, also available in Penguin Classics.

‘A wonderfully luminous drama’
Gore Vidal

‘One of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written’
A.N. Wilson

Read a sample here