With painful consistency, Henry James denied his characters the experience of fulfilled love. Yet in the final pages of The Golden Bowl, James affirms and celebrates the renewal of Maggie Verver's marriage and the consummation of her passion. McWhirter argues that James' last three novels in fact embody a radical refashioning of his vision.

Sheldon M. Novick has written an extensive biographical introduction. This is complimented by an essay documenting James's friendships with younger men, which includes quotations from unpublished letters. Other subjects include the influence on James of the emergence of a specific concept of 'the homosexual' and James's reactions to the aesthetic movement; and there are close analyses of many of James's stories and novels, selected so that all of his career is represented.

For fans of The Paris Wife, a sparkling glimpse into the life of Edith Wharton and the scandalous love affair that threatened her closest friendship They say that behind every great man is a great woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned literary secretary and confidante. At the age of forty-five, despite her growing fame, Edith remains unfulfilled in a lonely, sexless marriage. Against all the rules of Gilded Age society, she falls in love with Morton Fullerton, a dashing young journalist. But their scandalous affair threatens everything in Edith’s life—especially her abiding ties to Anna. At a moment of regained popularity for Wharton, Jennie Fields brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s real letters and diary entries with her fascinating, untold love story. Told through the points of view of both Edith and Anna, The Age of Desire transports readers to the golden days of Wharton’s turn-of-the century world and—like the recent bestseller The Chaperone—effortlessly re-creates the life of an unforgettable woman.

The romantic side of Henry James, revealed through his letters to young male friends

Young Londoners Kate and Merton are engaged, but have no money to marry on. When the wealthy but terminally ill American heiress Milly arrives in London, Kate schemes for a way to inherit her fortune. But when Kate achieves all she had hoped for, she finds that the money and the gentle, beautiful Milly have changed everything.

The Wings of the Dove tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her effect on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honorable motives, while others are more self-interested. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two betrothed Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their WORLD comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, though she didn't reveal her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success... Henry James (1843 – 1916) was an American-British writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism.

Tessa Hadley examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralizing frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. Hadley argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping to leave behind a way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the 1890s as explorations of how disabling and distorting ideals of women's goodness and purity were learned and perpetuated within English and American cultural processes. These explorations, Hadley argues, liberate James to write the great heterosexual love affairs of the late novels, with their emphasis on the power of pleasure and play: themes which are central to James's ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure class society.