Book description
When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined
suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a
fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her
desire to win her father s love and approval and her passion for the
first man who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an
agonising dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the restrictions that
others seek to place on her freedom. James s masterly novel deftly
interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York
society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed.
Henry James was born in 1843 in Washington Place, New York, of Scottish
and Irish ancestry, and died in 1916. In addition to many short stories,
plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some
twenty novels, the first published being
Roderick Hudson
(1875). They include The Europeans
, Washington Square
, The Portrait of a Lady
, The Bostonians
, The Princess Casamassima
, The Tragic Muse
, The Spoils of Poynton
, The Awkward Age
, The Wings of the Dove
, The Ambassadors
and The Golden Bowl
.
