The Wings of the Dove
A young woman with no money is courted by a man who needs money, and an American heiress who is dying becomes the solution to both their problems. James builds the novel out of conversations in which everyone knows more than they are willing to say, and the reader has to work out the arrangement.
Venice supplies the atmosphere: water, hotels, a rented palace and a sense of time running out. It is one of James's most emotionally direct books, even though it is also one of his most syntactically difficult. The last third is almost unbearable, and deliberately so.
Public-domain status
First published in 1902. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Henry James died in 1916, so this work has been free to republish there since 1987.
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Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Venice — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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