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...rying to achieve, or reflect, that reality. Though the protagonist is an artist and illustrator of books, not a writer, it's not hard to imagine that James has himself, and other writers, in mind.(summary by Clifford)...

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...The Beast in the Jungle' is a 1903 novella by Henry James, first published as part of the collection, The Better Sort. Almost universally considered one of James' finest short narratives, this story treats appropriately universal themes: loneliness, fate, love and death....

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...Levity is not a word often applied to Henry James, but this story has about it an attractively lighthearted quality. It tells of Peter Baron, a poor, young struggling writer of adequate, if not transcendent, talent, who lives in a dreary London boarding house inh...

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...In the Cage is a novella by Henry James, first published as a book in 1898. This long story centers on an unnamed London telegraphist. She deciphers clues to her clients' personal lives from the often cryptic telegrams they submit to her as she sits in ...

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...ryday events. He meets a woman who shares his ideals, only to find that the past places what seems to be an impassable barrier between them. Although James was not religious in any conventional sense, the story shows a deep spirituality in its treatment of mortality and the transcendent power of unselfish love....

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...One of James’s favorite short novels, the Aspern Papers tells of the efforts of the nameless narrator to procure the papers of a famous, but now dead, American poet. His attempts to secure them from the poet’s former lover and her n...

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...have in fact missed the great point of Verreker's work, and the critic (and his editor) thereupon devote themselves to trying to unravel the mystery. James's story, however, almost certainly has an autobiographical side to it, perhaps itself criticizing those critics who couldn't see, or wouldn't see, the figures lost in the carpet of his own writing. (Summary by Nicholas ...

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...many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived. (summary taken from the Preface by Henry James)...

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...The Europeans: A sketch is a short novel by Henry James, published in 1878. It is essentially a comedy contrasting the behaviour and attitudes of two visitors from Europe with those of their relatives living in the 'new' world of New England. The novel first appeared a...

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...joyed, but it is soon clear that her husband is overcome by the discovery, and overcome in ways that are to be disquieting. In this, as in several of James's stories, there are elements of the supernatural -- or so the reader might invited to believe. To what, in any case, will the discovery lead? (Introduction by Nicholas Clifford...

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...Henry James wrote a number of ghost stories -- The Turn of the Screw being the most famous. Did he believe in ghosts himself, as did many of his contemporaries? It's generally possible to find earthly interpretations, Freudia...

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... are seen largely from the point of view of Fleda Vetch, the young woman who, her moral and aesthetic sensibilities tuned perhaps as finely as any of James's protagonists, finds herself caught in the middle. (Summary by Nicholas Clifford)...

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...Neither the name of Shakespeare nor that of Stratford appears directly in this short piece by James, and yet both are absolutely central to his plot. The story has to do with Mr. and Mrs. Gedge, tempted away from a dreary northern town library, which he runs, to become the wardens – caretakers and tour guides – of the...

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...The Jolly Corner, published in 1908, is considered by many to be a ghost story ranking second only to The Turn of the Screw. James’s protagonist, Spencer Brydon, is an American of 56, returned to New York after 33 years in Europe, where he has apparently accomplished little while living off his New York rentals. His friendship with Alice Staverton,...

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...Henry James considered The Ambassadors his best, or perhaps his best-wrought, novel. It plays on the great Jamesian theme of the American abroad, who finds himself in an older, and some would say richer, culture that that of ...

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...Daisy Miller is an 1878 novella by Henry James. It portrays the confused courtship of the eponymous American girl by Winterbourne, a compatriot of hers with much more sophistication. His pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned u...

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...The Turn of the Screw is a novella written by Henry James. It is a ghost story that was originally published in 1898. A nameless governess reports the events of two ghosts who stalk the young children she has charge over. Is she reliable, or an imaginative neurotic? (Sum...

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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 f...

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...One of James’s early novels, The American plunges right in to one of the writer’s most enduring subjects, that of the innocent, or at least inexperienced, American abroad, seeking to come to terms with the social customs and convent...

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...Washington Square is a short novel by Henry James. Originally published in 1880 as a serial in Cornhill Magazine and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it is a structurally simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilli...

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...The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880-1881 and then as a book in 1881. It is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who affronts her destiny an...

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...The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880-1881 and then as a book in 1881. It is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who affronts her destiny an...