The Golden Bowl
Written by Henry James
Narrated by Juliet Stevenson
4/5
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About this audiobook
Wealthy Maggie Verver has everything she could ever ask for—except a husband and a title. While in Italy, acquiring art for his museum back in the States, Maggie’s millionaire father, Adam, decides to remedy this and acquire a husband for Maggie.
Enter Prince Amerigo, of a titled but now poor aristocratic Florentine family. Amerigo is the perfect candidate. Delighted, Maggie then reciprocates by choosing a partner for her widower father: childhood friend Charlotte Stant. The stage is set, and what unfolds is a deep and gripping exploration of fidelity and the politics of love and marriage.
Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl displays Henry James at his finest: James weaves scene upon scene, set piece upon set piece, into a seamless whole, through a richly dense tapestry of beautiful, flowing prose. Along with The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, it constitutes James’ final and most rewarding phase as a novelist.
Henry James
Henry James was born in New York in 1843, the younger brother of the philosopher William James, and was educated in Europe and America. He left Harvard Law School in 1863, after a year's attendance, to concentrate on writing, and from 1869 he began to make prolonged visits to Europe, eventually settling in England in 1876. His literary output was both prodigious and of the highest quality: more than ten outstanding novels including his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady; countless novellas and short stories; as well as innumerable essays, letters, and other pieces of critical prose. Known by contemporary fellow novelists as 'the Master', James died in Kensington, London, in 1916.
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Reviews for The Golden Bowl
11 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I feel like James came most fully into his calling in Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. The Ambassadors somehow falls short...is, despite perhaps its author's closer identification with the protagonist's late "education," lacking in the finesse of symbolism, crafty, rather than simply cumbersome ambiguity, and thick as molasses double entendre, the which James simply invokes, in the Ambassadors' pages, to the effect of flirtatious splashes, whereas in the latter two novels, he swims a hearty breaststroke. Juliet Stevenson ranks as Venus in a pantheon of sacred readers, were the likes of George Guidall the mighty Zeus, Nick Sullivan a lithe Mercury, Simon Vance fair Apollo.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the third Henry James novel I've completed. It is a good book, but tends to get cumbersome with to many unnecessary words at times. The narrator definitely kept me going til the end.