The Golden Bowl (Volume II)

Shy Maggie Verver a young American heiress shares an uncommonly close bond with her father. Widower Adam Verver a financier and art connoisseur has bought everything he wants including a titled husband for his daughter. Maggie is charmed by Prince Amerigo an Italian nobleman of reduced means. Wishing to provide her father with companionship she persuades him to marry her best friend Charlotte Stant. But unbeknownst to Maggie and Adam Charlotte and the Prince are concealing a guilty secret that will strike at the foundations of both marriages.Henry James explores his favorite themes in this novel money class desire and the collision of European and American was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done a little something she was not always doing or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit positively of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense above all that she had made at a particular hour made by the mere touch of her hand a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden of her life but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda a structure plated with hard bright porcelain coloured and figured and adorned at the overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when stirred by chance airs.