“Even now it’s not a question of anything I should ask you in a way to ‘do.’ It’s simply a question of your not turning me away—taking yourself out of my life. It’s simply a question of your saying: ‘Yes then, since you will, we’ll stand together. We won’t worry in advance about how or where; we’ll have a faith and find a way.’ That’s all-that would be the good you’d do me. I should have you, and it would be for my benefit.” (page 36)
“She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.” (page 71)
The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. “I shall never be better than this.” (page 169)
“As I told you before, I’m American. Not that I mean that makes me worse. However, you’ll probably know what it makes me.”
(page 183)
“That’s the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I’m still more struck with what they think of their friends.” (page 265)
“I lie well, thank God.” (page 302)
“Since she’s to die I’m to marry her?” (page 375)
Venice glowed and plashed and called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. (page 420)
“She won’t have loved you for nothing.” (page 445)
“I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us.” (page 491)
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The Wings of the Dove
ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-296-3 ISBN-10: 1-59308-296-7
eISBN : 978-1-411-43351-9
LC Control Number 2004111990
Produced and published in conjunction with: Fine Creative Media, Inc. 322 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10001
Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher
Printed in the United States of America
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Henry James
The writer Henry James was born into a wealthy family in New York City in 1843. His father, Henry, Sr., was a religious free-thinker and follower of the philosopher Swedenborg, and associated with many of the literary men of his day, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Young Henry was educated privately in New York, Geneva, Paris, and London; the family lived alternately in Europe and the United States for much of his childhood.
He began his literary career writing for magazines. Having dropped out of Harvard Law School to pursue writing, he associated with the literary set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a good friend of budding novelist and critic William Dean Howells. In 1864 James’s first published piece of fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” appeared in the Continental Monthly. He also wrote reviews and articles for the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation. He frequently traveled to Europe and in 1876 settled permanently in London.
James is often cited as one of literature’s great stylists; it has been said that his writing surrounds a subject and illuminates it with a flickering light, rather than pinning it down; according to Virginia Woolf in her diaries, he spoke in the same way. His style became more and more indirect as he moved from his early period, when he produced novels that considered the differences between American and European culture and character—Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), Washington Square (1881), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881)—to his middle period, when he wrote two novels about social reformers and revolutionaries, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, both in 1886, as well as the novellas The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Turn of the Screw (1898).
In 1898 James retreated to Lamb House, a mansion he had purchased in Rye, England. There he produced the great works of his final period, in which in complex prose he subtly portrayed his characters’ inner lives: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). He returned to the United States for the last time to supervise production of a twenty-six-volume edition of his most important fictional works that was published between 1907 and 1917. The American Scene (1907), an account of his last journey to America, is highly critical of his native land. He became a British citizen in 1915. Shortly after receiving the Order of Merit, Henry James died, on February 28, 1916, leaving behind a prodigious body of work: twenty completed novels, 112 stories, and twelve plays, as well as voluminous travel writing and literary journalism and criticism.
The World of Henry James andThe Wings of the Dove
1789
William James, Henry’s grandfather, emigrates to the United States from Ireland.
1811
Henry James, Sr., the author’s father, is born.
1826
Washington Square is dedicated as a public place and military parade ground. Originally a marsh, then a graveyard, it served as a spot for duels and executions prior to this transformation.
1828
Construction begins on the first house on the north side of Washington Square; over the next thirty years Washington Square North will become the most expensive and fashionable street bordering Washington Square.
1832
William James dies, leaving a $3 million estate to his twelve children.
1835
Henry James’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Walsh, moves into a townhouse at 18 Washington Square North (now part of 2 Fifth Avenue), occupying it until 1847.
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