The Golden Bowl

Henry James

F

irst published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is James’s final major work of fiction. Intense, complex and allusive, it demonstrates his approach in dazzling style, remaining a testament to James’s power as a novelist and skill in exploring his characters’ consciousnesses.

The Golden Bowl

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Production Details:

Illustrated by Philip Bannister.

Bound in cloth, blocked with a design by Philip Bannister.

Set in Galliard with Medici display.

Frontispiece and 10 full-page colour illustrations, 512 pages.

‘Simple but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot... As formed of solid gold it was impressive; it seemed indeed to warn off the prudent admirer’

Wealthy American widower and art collector Adam Verver lives with his daughter Maggie in Europe. On a trip to Rome, they are introduced to Amerigo, an Italian prince in much reduced circumstances, yet with considerable charm of manner. Maggie and Amerigo marry but unbeknown to Maggie, Amerigo had previously had an affair with her childhood friend Charlotte Stant. These four lives become ever more intricately entangled as Maggie persuades her father to propose to Charlotte. Still focused on their own father-daughter relationship rather than their marriages, Maggie and Adam seem unaware that Charlotte and Amerigo's affair has been rekindled. Only when Maggie comes into possession of the eponymous gilded bowl does the veneer of propriety crack to reveal the truth.


‘You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.’
‘Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us.’

James was always fascinated by the clash between new world and European cultures, and the American idealism and romanticism of Adam and Maggie is contrasted with the cynical charm of Amerigo. Yet this broader context is almost incidental to the powerfully tangled relationship between father and daughter. James brilliantly portrays their complex connection with a psychological acuity ahead of his time. In depicting Maggie's gradually awakening maturity and intelligence, he creates one of the most interesting and developed of all his heroines.

The critic F. O. Mathiesson called the three books James wrote just after the turn of the century – The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl – his most significant works and the highest achievement of James's major phase as an author. Today they continue to obsess readers and critics with their densely interwoven imagery and subtle, nuanced characters.

The Golden Bowl is the third and final novel of James's great masterpieces to be published by The Folio Society. Created in series with The Ambassadors, it is illustrated by Philip Bannister whose watercolours capture the elegant but suffocating world Henry James portrays so well.

This edition includes an introduction by Colm Tóibín – shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for his re-imagining of James's life in The Master. For Tóibín, in The Golden Bowl James’s subtle tapestry of language and ability to embrace his characters, neither condemning nor approving, but allowing them to become utterly real to the reader, show ‘his talent as a stylist and as a novelist at its most supreme’.