Reading Groups

Henry James's The Golden Bowl with Sheridan Hay (Sold Out)

Four Sessions Wednesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT May 3 to May 24, 2023

Online via Zoom

This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Sam Lim-Kimberg at [email protected].

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.)

Led by

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), which features a lost novel by Herman Melville, was a Booksense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. An historical novel, Unfolded, will be published in 2024. Sheridan has led The Center’s Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as leading a popular Henry James group, and most recently, a group dedicated to the work of Shirley Hazzard.

About this series

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