Wings of the Dove ANNOTATION
Edited with an introduction by Peter Brooks. This edition of Jame's poignant and dramatic novel is based on the revised New York Edition.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The text of this revised Norton Critical Edition is the fully corrected and annotated reproduction of the New York Edition (1909), together with the author's preface and the two frontispieces that Henry James commissioned from photographer Alvin Langdon Cobum for the two volumes of the New York Edition. The "Textual Appendix" provides readers with a full account of The Wings of the Dove's publication and textual history, including quotations from fifteen previously unpublished letters that James wrote to his London literary agent and all of the substantive revisions that James made to the novel both in 1902 and in 1909." Eleven essays are included. Several of these critical essays, in particular that by Mazzella composed especially for this edition, address the relationship of the novel to its film adaptation. A new chronology of James's life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also provided.
SYNOPSIS
Neither Edith Wharton nor E. M. Forster admired it, but Louis Auchincloss calls The Wings of the Dove 'perhaps the greatest of Henry James's novels.' Published in 1902, the novel represented something of a comeback for James, whose only 'bestseller,' Daisy Miller, had appeared more than two decades earlier.
FROM THE CRITICS
AudioFile
James's story of a love triangle in which nobody really wins is brought to life in shortened form in this excellent production. Kate Coy wants the impoverished Merton Densher, but she wants money, too. When dying American heiress Milly Theale enters their orbit, Kate plots to have Merton marry her and eventually inherit her fortune. Prunella Scales's elegant reading is a good match for James's prose. Her delivery of flat American diction and cultured British voices points up the English-American dichotomy in James's work. She makes Kate's Aunt Maude the penultimate upperclass Brit; one misses only the sound of youth in Kate's voice. The abridgment warrants careful listening, and two listenings would be even more rewarding. J.B.G. ﾽ AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
James did nothing like an Englishman - or an American. He was a great fact in himself, a new world, a terra incognita that he would devote all his days to mapping for the rest of us... James was the master of the novel in English in a way that no one had ever been before; or had ever been since. — Jonathan Lyons
Home
