Henry James

At first, Maisie didn't know much — she was only six years old when her mother and father divorced. Her embittered parents shared custody, using the child as a pawn in their struggles. Neglected and exploited, Maisie shuttled back and forth between their homes. The things she saw and overheard, as her elders re-married and conducted adulterous affairs, hastened her growth from early childhood to a precocious maturity.
Rather than offering a gloomy tale of innocence corrupted, What Maisie Knew abounds in dark humor and savage wit. Henry James takes particular aim at the mores of the English upper classes in his tale of a sensitive little girl and her spirited reaction to irresponsible, self-absorbed adults. Written in an era when divorce was far less common than it is today, this 1897 novel is strikingly modern in its subject and narrative voice.

Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes' past, he confronts a moral dilemma: Should he expose them and thus gain his revenge? James's masterly early work is at once a social comedy, a melodramatic romance and a realistic novel of manners.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence that is at once casual and tense with force and insight.

Brought up in poverty, Hyacinth has nevertheless developed aesthetic tastes that heighten his awareness of the sordid misery around him . He is drawn into the secret world of revolutionary politics and, in a moment of fervour, makes a vow that he will assassinate a major political figure.

In The Bostonians, Henry James tackles one of the burning questions of his time... the 'woman question.' The story settles on a competition to win over the love of Verena Tarrant between Basil Ransom and Olive Chancellor. This is one of James' more humorous novels and explores the idea of feminism and human possession.

Roderick Hudson, egotistical, beautiful and an exceptionally gifted sculptor, but poor, is taken from New England to Rome by Rowland Mallet, a rich man of fine sensibilities, who intends to give Roderick the scope to develop his genius. Together they seem like twins or lovers, opposing halves of what should have been an ideal whole.

James's chilling ghost story of innocence and evil

One summer a young governess is sent to take charge of Miles and Flora, two beautiful, charming orphans living in a country house. But silence covers their past. Then the servants reappear who, before they died, had looked after the children. As winter closes in, the young governess struggles to keep her charges from the unnatural influences which they seem strangely to desire.

Terror makes this a ghost story, while uncertainty makes it horrifying. Are the apparitions the governess' invention? And if so, does the evil lie not in the children, but in love–sick young women– and in adult society itself?

The most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes and chronology of James Life and times

Mrs Gereth is convinced that Fleda Vetch would make the perfect daughter-in-law. Only the dreamy, highly-strung young woman can genuinely appreciate, and perhaps eventually share, Mrs Gereth's passion for her 'things' - the antique treasures she has amassed at Poynton Park in the south of England. Owen Gereth, however, has inconveniently become engaged to the uncultured Mona Brigstock. As a dramatic family quarrel unfolds, the hesitating Fleda is drawn in, yet she remains reluctant to captivate Owen, who seems as attracted to her as she is to him. Is she motivated by scruple or fear? In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), Henry James created a work of exquisite ambiguity in his depiction of three women fighting for the allegiance of one weak-willed man.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it." —Henry James

In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James's enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe. John Auchard's lively introduction and extensive notes illuminate the surprising differences between the historical, political, and artistic Italy of James's travels and the metaphoric Italy that became the setting of some of his best-known works of fiction. This edition includes an appendix of James's book reviews on Italian travel-writing.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his shy daughter, Maggie, live in Europe, closely tied through their love of art and their mutual admiration.  Maggie's future seems assured when she becomes the wife of a charming, though impoverished, Italian prince. But when Adam marries his daughter's friend Charlotte Stant, unaware that she is the prince's mistress, the stage is set for a complex and indirect battle between the two wives. The brilliant Charlotte is determined to keep her lover, while Maggie is determined to protect her beloved father from any knoweldge of their shared betrayal. 

The acuity with which Henry James calibrates the four characters' delicately shifting alliances and documents the maturation of a naïve young woman marks this as a magnificent achievement. The Golden Bowl was not only James's last major work but also the novel in which his unparalleled gift for psychological drama reached its height.

Introduction by Denis Donoghue