Tells the stories of a fortune hunter, an American heiress living in Europe, and a naive young woman torn between love and idealism.

Washington Square is a tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, unemotional father. The plot of the novel is based upon a true story told to James by his close friend, British actress Fanny Kemble. The book is often compared with Jane Austen's work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships. Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy and highly successful physician, lives in Washington Square, New York with his daughter Catherine. Catherine is a sweet-natured young woman who is a great disappointment to her father, being physically plain and, he believes, dull in terms of personality and intellect. His sister, Lavinia Penniman, a meddlesome woman with a weakness for romance and melodrama, is the only other member of the doctor's household. Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-British writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism.

Five novels dramatize the interaction of Americans with more sophisticated Europeans.

Publisher description

American Pop pioneer Jim Dine was asked by Los Angeles' Getty Museum in 2007 to produce the first contemporary project for the Getty Villa in Malibu by responding in some way to its renowned antiquities collection. Dine was drawn to the collection's ancient Greek sculptures and was given a room in the Villa for which he created three new monumental wood sculptures that he painted brightly in the Hellenistic tradition. Dine also wrote a long poem, which he installed alongside the sculptures, on the gallery wall. Jim Dine: Poet Singing (The Flowering Sheets) documents the entire process with photographs by Dine, Diana Michener and Gerhard Steidl. Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935. He came to prominence in New York in the 1960s with Happenings that he orchestrated along with Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow.

Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the charming but inscrutable young American of the title shocks European society with her casual indifference to its social mores. The novella was popular in part because of the debates it sparked about foreign travel, the behaviour of women, and cultural clashes between people of different nationalities and social classes. This Broadview edition presents an early version of James’s best-known novella within the cultural contexts of its day. In addition to primary materials about nineteenth-century womanhood, foreign travel, medicine, philosophy, theatre, and art—some of the topics that interested James as he was writing the story—this volume includes James’s ruminations on fiction, theatre, and writing, and presents excerpts of Daisy Miller as he rewrote it for the theatre and for a much later and heavily revised edition.