Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinaryliterary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove(1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. Jamesdrew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create oneof the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with ashort time to live and a passion for experiencing life to itsfullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and themagnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceitand betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about thefrailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of needand desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these threecharacters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-litpiazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almostunprecedented in his work. Under its brilliant, coruscatingsurfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical andpsychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers anunfettered vision of our civilization and its discontents. Itrepresents a culmination of James's art and, as such, of the art ofthe novel itself.
【作者简介】
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City. He traveled andstudied extensively in New York, London, Paris and Geneva, andreturned to the States in 1860, enrolling in Harvard Law School twoyears later. By 1865 he had begun to contribute reviews and shortstories to periodicals in earnest. His first major piece offiction, "Watch and Ward," was serialized in The AtlanticMonthly in 1870, and Roderick Hudson, his first majornovel, was published in 1875. James spent the following decadesabroad, first visiting Paris, where he met Ivan Turgenev, EmileZola and Gustave Flaubert, then settling in London, where he livedfor over twenty years and wrote several novels, includingWashington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, TheBostonians, and The Princess Casamassima. In 1897 hemoved to Lamb House in Rye, where he wrote his later novels,including The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove,The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, and well as hispopular ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw." James became aBritish subject in 1915. Two unfinished novels, The IvoryTower and The Sense of the Past, were published asfragments after his death on February 28, 1916.
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