The Golden Bowl

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 cultures. Excerpt: He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. "My Golden Bowl," he observed--and it sounded on his lips as if it said everything. He left the important object--for as "important" it did somehow present itself--to produce its certain effect. Simple but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height.