The Wings of the Dove

Confronting a Bronzino portrait in an English country house, a young American heiress comes face to face with her own predicament. For Milly Theale, who seems to have the world before her and at her feet, is fatally ill. Eager for life, eager for love, she embarks on her European adventure, warming to the admiration of her new friends Kate Croy and Merton Densher. But Merton and Kate are secretly engaged, and come to see in this angel with a thumping bank account as a solution to their own problems. For the remarkable Kate, scheming, passionate, poetic, also wants to live...This edition of James's poignant and dramatic novel is based on the revised New York Edition. The cover pictures the Bronzino portrait which is the focus of the key scene in the book.

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City.  He traveled and studied extensively in New York, London, Paris and Geneva, and returned to the States in 1860, enrolling in Harvard Law School two years later.  By 1865 he had begun to contribute reviews and short stories to periodicals in earnest.  His first major piece of fiction, "Watch and Ward," was serialized in <b>The Atlantic Monthly</b> in 1870, and <b>Roderick Hudson</b>, his first major novel, was published in 1875.  James spent the following decades abroad, first visiting Paris, where he met Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, then settling in London, where he lived for over twenty years and wrote several novels, including <b>Washington Square</b>, <b>The Portrait of a Lady</b>, <b>The Bostonians</b>, and <b>The Princess Casamassima</b>.  In 1897 he moved to Lamb House in Rye, where he wrote his later novels, including <b>The Awkward Age</b>, <b>The Wings of the Dove</b>, <b>The Ambassadors</b>, and <b>The Golden Bowl</b>, and well as his popular ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw." James became a British subject in 1915.  Two unfinished novels, <b>The Ivory Tower</b> and <b>The Sense of the Past</b>, were published as fragments after his death on February 28, 1916.