Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

“Even now it’s not a question of anything I should ask you in a way to ‘do.’ It’s simply a question of your not turning me away—taking yourself out of my life. It’s simply a question of your saying: ‘Yes then, since you will, we’ll stand together. We won’t worry in advance about how or where; we’ll have a faith and find a way.’ That’s all-that would be the good you’d do me. I should have you, and it would be for my benefit.” (page 36)

“She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.” (page 71)

The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. “I shall never be better than this.” (page 169)

“As I told you before, I’m American. Not that I mean that makes me worse. However, you’ll probably know what it makes me.”

(page 183)

“That’s the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I’m still more struck with what they think of their friends.” (page 265)

“I
lie well, thank God.” (page 302)

“Since she’s to die I’m to marry her?” (page 375)

Venice glowed and plashed and called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. (page 420)

“She won’t have loved you for nothing.” (page 445)

“I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us.” (page 491)

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The Wings of the Dove
was first published in 1902. The present text follows James’s revised “New York Edition” of 1907.

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

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The Wings of the Dove

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-296-3 ISBN-10: 1-59308-296-7

eISBN : 978-1-411-43351-9

LC Control Number 2004111990

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Henry James

The writer Henry James was born into a wealthy family in New York City in 1843. His father, Henry, Sr., was a religious free-thinker and follower of the philosopher Swedenborg, and associated with many of the literary men of his day, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Young Henry was educated privately in New York, Geneva, Paris, and London; the family lived alternately in Europe and the United States for much of his childhood.

He began his literary career writing for magazines. Having dropped out of Harvard Law School to pursue writing, he associated with the literary set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a good friend of budding novelist and critic William Dean Howells. In 1864 James’s first published piece of fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” appeared in the
Continental Monthly.
He also wrote reviews and articles for the
Atlantic Monthly
and the
Nation.
He frequently traveled to Europe and in 1876 settled permanently in London.

James is often cited as one of literature’s great stylists; it has been said that his writing surrounds a subject and illuminates it with a flickering light, rather than pinning it down; according to Virginia Woolf in her diaries, he spoke in the same way. His style became more and more indirect as he moved from his early period, when he produced novels that considered the differences between American and European culture and character—
Roderick Hudson
(1876), The
American
(1877),
The Europeans
(1878),
Daisy Miller
(1879),
Washington Square
(1881), and
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881)—to his middle period, when he wrote two novels about social reformers and revolutionaries,
The Bostonians
and
The Princess Casamassima,
both in 1886, as well as the novellas The
Aspern Papers
(1888) and
The Turn of the Screw
(1898).

In 1898 James retreated to Lamb House, a mansion he had purchased in Rye, England. There he produced the great works of his final period, in which in complex prose he subtly portrayed his characters’ inner lives: The
Wings of the Dove
(1902),
The Ambassadors
(1903), and
The Golden Bowl
(1904). He returned to the United States for the last time to supervise production of a twenty-six-volume edition of his most important fictional works that was published between 1907 and 1917.
The American Scene
(1907), an account of his last journey to America, is highly critical of his native land. He became a British citizen in 1915. Shortly after receiving the Order of Merit, Henry James died, on February 28, 1916, leaving behind a prodigious body of work: twenty completed novels, 112 stories, and twelve plays, as well as voluminous travel writing and literary journalism and criticism.

The World of Henry James and
The Wings of the Dove

1789	William James, Henry’s grandfather, emigrates to the United States from Ireland.
1811	Henry James, Sr., the author’s father, is born.
1826	Washington Square is dedicated as a public place and military parade ground. Originally a marsh, then a graveyard, it served as a spot for duels and executions prior to this transformation.
1828	Construction begins on the first house on the north side of Washington Square; over the next thirty years Washington Square North will become the most expensive and fashionable street bordering Washington Square.
1832	William James dies, leaving a $3 million estate to his twelve children.
1835	Henry James’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Walsh, moves into a townhouse at 18 Washington Square North (now part of 2 Fifth Avenue), occupying it until 1847. James visits her often as an infant and toddler.
1836	Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his essay “Nature,” setting forth the main principles of Transcendentalism.
1837	William Dean Howells is born; he will be James’s colleague, an important editor, and a founder of American “realism.”
1840	Henry James, Sr., marries Mary Robertson Walsh of New York City.
1842	William, the eldest child of Henry, Sr., and Mary James, is born.
1843	On April 15, Henry James, Jr., is born at 21 Washington Place, in New York City, around the corner from his grandmother. In October the James family relocates to Europe.
1844	The family returns to New York City.
1845	Henry’s brother Garth Wilkinson (“Wilky”) James is born.
1846	Another brother, Robertson (“Bob”) James, is born.
1848	Alice James is born.
1849	The social circle Henry, Sr., inhabits comprises philosophers and writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry, Jr., is educated privately in the United States and Europe. His exposure to the Old World during his formative years establishes in him a lifelong preference for Europe over America.
1853	The New York City Commission pays $5,000,000 for land that will become Central Park, a vast public recreation space in the European style. The first portion of the park will open in 1858; it will be complete some sixteen years hence.
1857	The Atlantic Monthly is founded by Moses Dresser Phillips and Francis H. Underwood. Early contributors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell (the magazine’s first editor), and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In coming years Henry James, Jr., will be a frequent contributor.
1859	In October Henry, Sr., takes his family to Geneva.
1860	The family returns to America in September and settles in Newport, Rhode Island.
1861	The American Civil War begins.
1862	Henry James, Jr., enrolls at Harvard Law School but drops out after a year to pursue a writing career. He becomes friendly with writer William Dean Howells.
1864	In February James publishes his first piece of fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” in the Continental Monthly. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies.
1865	James begins to write reviews for the Nation, a new liberal weekly. The American Civil War ends.
1866	The first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable links Europe and America, vastly increasing the speed of information transmittal.
1869	In England James meets George Eliot and writes reviews of her works, including Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, which are published in the Atlantic Monthly and
the Galaxy, a literary journal. Mark Twain publishes the best-selling travel book The Innocents Abroad, based on letters he had written while journeying by steamship to Europe and the Holy Land; it treats hallowed Old World landmarks with irreverence and parodies the manners and mores of Europeans and Americans.
1870	James’s cousin Mary (“Minny”) Temple dies in March, and the author, devastated, moves back to New York. His social opportunities are abundant; he spends time at Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, and meets Henry Adams, who has just been appointed editor of the North American Review. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.
1871	James publishes his first novel, Watch and Ward, in installments in the Atlantic; it introduces what will be a prominent Jamesian theme: the development of a young girl into womanhood.
1872	Assigned to write a travel series for the Nation, James sails to Liverpool and spends time in Europe. Susan B. Anthony casts a vote in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, and is arrested.
1873	Financial panic grips New York with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, the nation’s preeminent investment bank. After a ten-year economic boom, the United States enters its worst depression to date, although New York continues its prodigious growth.
1875	James publishes in the Atlantic Monthly the novel Roderick Hudson, about an American sculptor in Rome and his struggle to reconcile art and passion. During his early period (also called his international period), he compares the people and cultures of the United States and Europe, focusing especially on the differences. While living in Paris, James associates with the writers Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, as well as Russian expatriate authors, including the novelist Ivan Turgenev. He works on his novel The American, about a self-made American millionaire who tries to marry the daughter of French aristocrats.
1876	Roderick Hudson is published in book form. Impatient with
1877	The American is published in book form. James is friendly with Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, and Robert Browning. While in Rome, James hears about an American “child of nature and of freedom” who consorted with a “good-looking Roman, of vague identity.” James is immediately inspired to turn this story into a novel, Daisy Miller.
1878	James publishes the short novel The Europeans. The Macmillan Publishing Company of London asks him to write a biography of either Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne.
1879	James publishes Daisy Miller, about a young American woman in Rome, in book form. He signs a contract for the British copyright on Hawthorne, which is published in the English Men of Letters series in London.
1880- 1881	The focus of James’s writing shifts to social and psychological drama. Washington Square is serialized in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s (1880) and released in book form (1881); the novel concerns a young American woman whose father rejects the man she wants to marry. The Portrait of a Lady is serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly (1880-1881), and in book form (1881); this brilliant novel depicts a young American woman who out of a kind of generosity marries the wrong man. James vows “never again to return” to New York, in a fit of disdain over the way the city’s “oppressive” economic growth has lowered the quality of life.
1882	James travels to Washington, D.C., where he briefly meets Oscar Wilde.
1886	James publishes the first novels of his middle period: The Bostonians, the story of a struggle between a southern conservative and an embittered suffragist, and The Princess Casamassima, an exploration of the personal dangers involved in taking up anarchism and revolution.
1888	James publishes the short novel The Aspern Papers, about a man who woos the custodian of letters by a poet he idolizes.
1889	Psychologically and financially depressed by the failure of The Bostonians, James shifts his focus to playwriting for the next six years.
Casamassima, an exploration of the personal dangers involved in taking anarchism and revolution.
1888	up James publishes the short novel The Aspern Papers, about a man who woos the custodian of letters by a poet he idolizes.
1889	Psychologically and financially depressed by the failure of The Bostonians, James shifts his focus to playwriting for the next six years.
1890	He publishes The Tragic Muse, about art and theater in London and Paris. His brother William publishes his groundbreaking and influential Principles of Psychology, in which pragmatism and “radical empiricism” are key elements.
1891	James’s dramatization of The American fares moderately well.
1892	After a life beset by illness, Alice James dies in England, with Henry at her side.
1895	James’s first dramatic work written as such, Guy Domville, is booed by the opening-night audience and receives mostly negative reviews, though George Bernard Shaw praises it. After little success with playwriting, James returns to writing fiction. The United States increases its involvement in a conflict between Spain and Cuba, which wants independence from Spanish rule. James opposes this involvement, calling it “none of our business.”
1897	He publishes What Maisie Knew, the story of a preadolescent girl who must chose between her parents and a governess.
1898	James publishes the ghost story The Turn of the Screw. He purchases Lamb House, in Rye, England, where he will write his last novels and letters. The Spanish-American War takes place.
1900	During the final stage of his writing career, James’s style becomes increasingly complex and convoluted. Over the next few years, he produces what are often considered his greatest works.
1902	He publishes The Wings of the Dove, about a group of people who scheme to inherit a dying woman’s fortune.
1903	The Ambassadors, about an American suspicious of European
ways who is won over by life in Paris, is published, as is “The Beast in the Jungle,” a story of a man who believes he is intended for something remarkable. In London, James meets Edith Wharton.
1904	His novel of adultery The Golden Bowl is published. He travels to the United States to oversee the production of a revised collection of his most important works of fiction.
1907	James publishes The American Scene, his observations on what America has become. Publication of the twenty-six volumes of the revised fiction collection, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, begins; it will continue until 1917.
1908	James publishes the story “The Jolly Corner,” an oblique commentary on the America he has left behind.
1910	In January James becomes very ill. He is nursed by his brother William and William’s wife, Alice, and the three return to North America. William, also ill, dies shortly thereafter. James visits New York, where he receives psychiatric care.
1911	In August he returns to England.
1914	James begins work on two novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, which he will not complete before his death.
1915	James’s health deteriorates. He becomes a British subject.
1916	On New Year’s Day he receives the Order of Merit. On February 28 Henry James dies. His ashes are taken to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be buried in American soil, near his brother William.
1917	Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past are published in their unfinished state.

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