编辑推荐
The Wings of the Dove is a classic example of Henry
James's morality tales that play off the naiveté of an American
protagonist abroad. In early-20th-century London, Kate Croy and
Merton Densher are engaged in a passionate, clandestine love
affair. Croy is desperately in love with Densher, who has all the
qualities of a potentially excellent husband: he's handsome, witty,
and idealistic--the one thing he lacks is money, which ultimately
renders him unsuitable as a mate. By chance, Croy befriends a young
American heiress, Milly Theale. When Croy discovers that Theale
suffers from a mysterious and fatal malady, she hatches a plan that
can give all three characters something that they want--at a price.
Croy and Densher plan to accompany the young woman to Venice where
Densher, according to Croy's design, will seduce the ailing
heiress. The two hope that Theale will find love and happiness in
her last days and--when she dies--will leave her fortune to
Densher, so that he and Croy can live happily ever after. The
scheme that at first develops as planned begins to founder when
Theale discovers the pair's true motives shortly before her death.
Densher struggles with unanticipated feelings of love for his new
paramour, and his guilt may obstruct his ability to avail himself
of Theale's gift. James deftly navigates the complexities and irony
of such moral treachery in this stirring novel.
内容简介
Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary
literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
(1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James
drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one
of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a
short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its
fullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and the
magnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceit
and betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about the
frailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of need
and desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these three
characters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-lit
piazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almost
unprecedented in his work. Under its brilliant, coruscating
surfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical and
psychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers an
unfettered vision of our civilization and its discontents. It
represents a culmination of James's art and, as such, of the art of
the novel itself.
作者简介
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City. He traveled and
studied extensively in New York, London, Paris and Geneva, and
returned to the States in 1860, enrolling in Harvard Law School two
years later. By 1865 he had begun to contribute reviews and short
stories to periodicals in earnest. His first major piece of
fiction, "Watch and Ward," was serialized in The Atlantic
Monthly in 1870, and Roderick Hudson, his first major
novel, was published in 1875. James spent the following decades
abroad, first visiting Paris, where he met Ivan Turgenev, Emile
Zola and Gustave Flaubert, then settling in London, where he lived
for over twenty years and wrote several novels, including
Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The
Bostonians, and The Princess Casamassima. In 1897 he
moved to Lamb House in Rye, where he wrote his later novels,
including The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove,
The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, and well as his
popular ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw." James became a
British subject in 1915. Two unfinished novels, The Ivory
Tower and The Sense of the Past, were published as
fragments after his death on February 28, 1916.