Book description
After her parents' bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself
shuttled between her selfish mother and vain father, who value her only
as a means for provoking each other. Maisie - solitary, observant and
wise beyond her years - is drawn into an increasingly entangled adult
world of intrigue and sexual betrayal, until she is finally compelled to
choose her own future.
What Maisie Knew
is a subtle yet devastating portrayal of an innocent adrift in a
corrupt society. Part of a relaunch of three James titles.
Henry
James was born on April 15th 1843 in New York. He was the brother of
the philosopher and psychologist William James. He spent a great deal
of his life in Europe, especially England. He is best known for his
cosmopolitan and often haunting portraits of European and American
life. His most famous fictional works include The Portrait of a
Lady (1881), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the
Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). He also
wrote literary criticism, most famously The Art of the Fiction
(1884). He died on February 28th 1916.
Christopher Ricks is Professor of the Humanities at Boston
University, where he has taught since 1986, and Co-Director of the
Editorial Institute. He was formerly King Edward VII Professor of
English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He has written
books on Milton, Tennyson, Keats, Eliot, Beckett and Bob Dylan, and he
has edited the poems of Tennyson, the early uncollected poems of
Eliot, the selected poems of James Henry, and the poems of Samuel
Menashe, as well as two anthologies.
