- Paperback: 592 pages
- Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks; New edition edition (18 Jun 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 019283861X
- ISBN-13: 978-0192838612
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,083,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Wings of the Dove (Classics)
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Product Description
Review
“Prunella Scales’s cultivated tones are well matched to the cadences of Jamesian language. In some of his scenes of satrirical observation her delivery of dialogue cleverly highlights a gentle but piercing wit.”
Herald 19/3/98
“”Listeners are likely to be drawn into the novel and rewarded for having chosen the aural route as opposed to the more arduous, printed path. James’s dense style is leavened when read aloud. This makes the descriptive passages more evocative and the dialogue more active and convincing.”
Observer 8/2/98
Product Description
Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its fullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and the magnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceit and betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about the frailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of need and desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these three characters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-lit piazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almost unprecedented in his work. Under its brilliant, coruscating surfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical and psychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers an unfettered vision of our civilization and its discontents. It represents a culmination of James's art and, as such, of the art of the novel itself.
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First Sentence
SHE WAITED, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
SHE WAITED, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Make no mistake: this is a major novel. It will take everything you've got and then some to get through it. The plotline is simple: who gets to take advantage of a rich dying girl before the others do? But the novel is not about its plot; it's about its language. And what language! It's like trying to swim upstream against prose badly translated out of a dead tongue. Sentences perpetually delaying conclusions and meanings put the reader in the same position as the characters: trapped in amber struggling to get free from their situations. The prose style becomes an affectation one gets past; it's no harder than adjusting to Shakespeare, and easier than Joyce. The language is the true hero of the book, for there's no one else suitable for the position (Milly seems more object than subject as the novel progresses, and is removed for the last third). The chief interest consists largely of what James is going to do next--which viewpoint to take? which episode to develop? All this said, the book does have punch at the end, as characters play their hands and admit to one another and themselves what they won't do.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I love Henry James' work, but getting through it is a trial of endurance. Don't try this if you are coming to his work for the first time. Try something shorter like "The Turn of the Screw" which is superb. This is also superb, but is so dense that the language and style takes enormous concentration in order to do the novel full justice. As usual with James' it is not the most cheerful of subject matters and centres around his preoccupation with American naivete struggling to survive in worldly Europe, but it is wonderfully tragic and has some gorgeous characters in it. For the same type of thing on the other side of the ocean try Edith Wharton.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In my humble opinion, this is James' best work. It surpasses even "The Ambassadors" and "The Golden Bowl" as well as his more often read, not to say more ubiquitous (since lousy movies from Hollywood seem to have revived interest in the author in a manner he would have found distinctly distasteful), earlier masterpieces, short and long. Shame on The Library of America for stalling out on its republication of James' work before getting to the late achievements. Here is one vote for completion of the canon in the usual estimable LOA volumes.
This is a novel to be savoured and treasured. If you're up to late James (he wrote ghost stories, but he's no Stephen King), read on without hesitation.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A long haul
As other reviewers have pointed out, this is not the easiest read. The language is certainly of its age and it took me some time to get used to it. Read more
Published on 3 Sep 2009 by G. Hill
Slow and painful - but very atmospheric
While reading this I repeatedly told people I was "bogged down" in Henry James which is, I think how many people would find this novel. Read more
Published on 21 Aug 2007 by J. Draper
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