This book is a collection of essays on ghostly fiction by Henry James. The contributors analyze James's use of the ghost story as a subgenre and the difficult theoretical issues that James's texts pose.

An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.

Contrary to the majority of Henry James's critics who either have ignored the central importance of love in his work or have mislabeled it as Platonic," "infantile," and "asexual," Philip Sicker shows that romantic love played a substantial role in James's fiction. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel. James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This meticulously edited collection includes Henry James' complete novels and short stories, as well as critical essays, plays, travel sketches and reports of the great author. The life of Henry James is revealed in different biographies, and in his three autobiographical books. Content: Novels: Watch and Ward Roderick Hudson The American The Europeans Confidence Washington Square The Portrait of a Lady The Bostonians The Princess Casamassima The Reverberator The Tragic Muse The Other House The Spoils of Poynton What Maisie Knew The Awkward Age The Sacred Fount The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl The Outcry The Ivory Tower The Sense of the Past Short Stories A Passionate Pilgrim The Last of the Valerii Eugene Pickering The Madonna of the Future The Romance of Certain Old Clothes Madame de Mauves Tales of Three Cities The Impressions of a Cousin Lady Barberina A New England Winter Stories Revived The Author of 'Beltraffio' Pandora The Path of Duty A Light Man A Day of Days Georgina's Reasons A Landscape-Painter Théodolinde (Rose-Agathe) Poor Richard Master Eustace A Most Extraordinary Case A London Life The Patagonia The Liar Mrs. Temperly The Real Thing Sir Dominick Ferrand Nona Vincent The Chaperon Greville Fane The Siege of London An International Episode The Pension Beaurepas A Bundle of Letters The Point of View Terminations Embarrassments The Two Magics The Soft Side The Finer Grain Other Stories Plays: Daisy Miller Pyramus and Thisbe Still Waters A Change of Heart The Album Disengaged Tenants The Reprobate Guy Domville The Outcry The High Bid Summersoft Travel Writings: A Little Tour in France English Hours Italian Hours The American Scene Transatlantic Sketches Portraits of Places Literary Essays: Notes on Novelists Views and Reviews Within the Rim and Other Essays French Poets and Novelists Partial Portraits Essays in London and Elsewhere Notes and Reviews Picture and Text Biographies: Hawthorne William Wetmore Story and His Friends Rupert Brooke Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others Notes of a Son and Brother The Middle Years

This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel. James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.