Henry James's The Golden Bowl with Sheridan Hay

The ‘With Book’ option includes a copy of The Golden Bowl at a 10% discount from our Bookstore. Please allow 2 weeks for shipped books to arrive.

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Meeting Dates:
5/3, 5/10, 5/17, 5/24
Online via Zoom

Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl was Henry James’s last complete novel, written during his final “major phase.” It also has the distinction of being the only one of his novels where, in the words of Leon Edel, “things come out right for his characters.” James himself thought The Golden Bowl “the most done of my productions—the most composed and constructed and completed.”

The Golden Bowl is the story of two couples: fabulously wealthy art collector, American Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie, who each marry a beautiful creature too poor to marry each other. In Maggie’s case, an aristocratic but impoverished Italian Prince, Amerigo; in Adam Verver’s, Maggie’s beautiful, brilliant childhood friend, Charlotte Stant. What the Ververs do not know is that they have married a magnificent pair, and the plot, with its “adulterine element,” unfolds just after Maggie marries her handsome Prince in London.

Participants should read Volume One, The Prince, Book First in advance of the first session. (Any edition of the New York Edition text will do. The revised edition was published in 1909.)