In the Library
The Golden Bowl
Henry James, 1904
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 42
- Length
- Length 204k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
'See'? I see nothing but you.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James
James's other late masterpiece does the same thing, but through an heiress dying by inches while two lovers circle her fortune with the same terrible patience.
£1.99
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Wharton does the same thing, but from inside a New York drawing room where every unspoken rule matters more than any spoken vow.
£1.99
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert does the same thing, but strips away the manners entirely and lets the marriage collapse in the open, cruelly and fast.
£1.99
About the book
In a curiosity shop in Bloomsbury, a shopman holds a bowl of gilded crystal to the light and tells the two people examining it that the gold hides a crack clean through the glass. They put it down and walk away without it. Before long both will marry other people. Years later Maggie Verver buys that very bowl as a birthday gift for her father, and in buying it she buys the truth about her husband and the friend she loves best, a truth Henry James spends the novel watching her decide what to do with. She does not accuse, does not weep; she watches, she waits, and with a patience that starts to feel like genius, rearranges a marriage from the inside without once raising her voice. James's sentences coil back on themselves, doubling every fact with the fact behind it, until a single scene holds a whole silent war. At the end Amerigo can say only that he sees nothing but her, and the bowl, cracked all along, is still the truest thing in the house.