Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-born novelist who settled in England in 1876 and became a British subject in 1915. Brother of the psychologist William James, he made the encounter of innocent Americans with old Europe his signature subject in works such as Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. His later style, dense and psychologically subtle, made him a key precursor of literary modernism; he was also a major writer of ghost stories and criticism.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
