Henry James
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STORY BY Henry James
Washington Square
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Washington Square by Henry James. Washington Square marks the culmination of Henry James's apprentice period as a novelist. With sharply focused attention upon just four principal characters, James provides an acute analysis of middle-class manners and behaviour in the New York of the 1870s, a period of great change in the life of the city. This change is explored through the device of setting the novel's action during the 1840s, similarly a period of considerable turbulence as the United States experienced the onset of rapid commercial and industrial expansion. Through the relationships between Austin Sloper, a celebrated physician, and his sister Lavinia Penniman, his daughter Catherine, and Catherine's suitor, Morris Townsend, James observes the contemporary scene as a site of competing styles and performances where authentic expression cannot be articulated or is subject to suppression.
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The Ambassadors
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The Ambassadors by Henry James. First published in 1903, the novel follows middle-aged Lambert Strether as he is dispatched from Massachusetts to Paris by his wealthy fiancée to rescue her son, Chad Newsome, from the corrupting influences of Europe and its wicked women. Once the mild-mannered and inexperienced Strether arrives in Paris, however, Chad introduces him to a world that he finds refined and sophisticated, rather than debauched and base. Mrs. Newsome, waiting in Massachusetts, grows impatient and sends more ambassadors to retrieve her wayward men. But Strether has become especially enchanted by Chad’s female friends Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne, and he begins to wonder if, all his life, he has missed out on what the wider world has to offer. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” he tells a friend in one of the most memorable scenes in this darkly comic, masterfully written story of liberation, self-discovery, and the meaning of living well.
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In The Cage
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In The Cage by Henry James. An unnamed telegraphist works in the branch post office at Cocker's, a grocer in a fashionable London neighborhood. Her fiancé, a decent if unpolished man named Mr. Mudge, wants her to move to a less expensive neighborhood to save money and to be near him at all times. She refuses because she likes the glimpses of society life she gets from the telegrams at her current location. Through those telegrams, she gets "involved" with a pair of lovers named Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. By remembering certain code numbers in the telegrams, she manages to reassure Everard at a particular crisis that their secrets are safe from detection. Later she learns from her friend Mrs. Jordan that Lady Bradeen and Everard are getting married after the recent death of Lord Bradeen. The unnamed telegraphist also learns that Everard is heavily in debt and that Lady Bradeen is forcing him to marry her, as Everard is really not interested in her. The telegraphist finally decides to marry Mudge and reflects on the unusual events of which she was a part.
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The American
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The American by Henry James. Henry James's third novel is an exploration of his most powerful, perennial theme - the clash between European and American cultures, the Old World and the New. Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes' past, he confronts a moral dilemma: Should he expose them and thus gain his revenge? James's masterly early work is at once a social comedy, a melodramatic romance and a realistic novel of manners.
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The Turn of the Screw
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The Turn of the Screw is a short ghost story by Henry James A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate...An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls... But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.
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Ritratto di signora
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EDIZIONE REVISIONATA 20/09/2019. IN OFFERTA LANCIO! Era una ragazza intelligente e generosa, una bella e libera natura: ma che cosa avrebbe fatto di sé? La giovane americana Isabel Archer alla ricerca di un ruolo pubblico e di modelli di comportamento meno provinciali, decide di stabilirsi in Europa, rifiuta due proposte di matrimonio e, diventata ricca al punto di potersi permettere tutto, resta intrappolata in quella ricca società fiorentina e romana che ritrova il suo simbolo ideale in Gilbert Osmond, uno snob in caccia di patrimoni, preoccupato soltanto che siano rispettati i codici di comportamento dell’aristocrazia. Sarà lui ad assicurare un destino di solitudine a Isabel che, prigioniera del rapporto con Osmond e relegata al ruolo ufficiale di moglie e madre, si avvierà per gradi, alla propria decadenza psichica. “Ritratto di signora” può essere letto come il romanzo di un’iniziazione americana, o come il romanzo della realtà del denaro e del potere che ne deriva, ma resta soprattutto un paesaggio d’anime, tratteggiato da un maestro del realismo psicologico.
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