The story begins in South Bradfield, Massachusetts, with the main character, Lydia Blood, accompanied by her Aunt Maria and her grandfather Deacon Latham on their family farm. Both of Lydia's parents had died of illness when Lydia was young and she is now, at the age of nineteen, being sent to live with her other aunt, on her father's side of the family, Aunt Josephine, in Venice, Italy. Lydia was not only blessed with good looks and good smarts, but she also was blessed with a beautiful singing voice which she is going to cultivate in Venice and attempt to make a career out of. Her Aunt Josephine wrote to her grandfather suggesting that Lydia should come to Venice to live with her.

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Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary critics—his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities—Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others—William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

'The Lady of the Aroostook, published in 1879, is a moralistic comedy of manners. Howells' prolific use of language has made it remarkably interesting. A must-read!...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Widely considered James's first great work of fiction and highly innovative in its narrative techniques, The Portrait of a Lady follows the story of an ardent, idealistic American heroine, Isabel Archer, in a cosmopolitan Europe. It explores individual freedom amidst confining circumstance, romantic choice, and the consequences of disillusionment and betrayal. This edition, based on the most reliable of the work's first book appearances (Macmillan, 1882), provides an authoritative text of one of James's finest long novels, with extensive annotations, a detailed textual history and an analysis of the reasons for its long-held popular appeal. It will be of particular interest not only to James scholars, but also book historians and students of nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature and culture.