Washington Square
A plain, shy young woman in New York is courted by a charming man who may want her money, and her father, a doctor, decides to find out. James wrote it after learning that a friend had been left a fortune by a relative who disapproved of her suitor, and the plot is almost that simple.
The novel is quiet and devastating. Dr Sloper is one of James's great creations, a man whose intelligence is inseparable from his cruelty. Catherine is not witty, and the book refuses to reward her with either romance or rebellion. The ending is one of the most chilling in nineteenth-century fiction.
Public-domain status
First published in 1880. 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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