The Golden Bowl, Volume I

The Golden Bowl, Volume I is the first volume of Henry James’s last completed major novel, published in 1904. The book was issued in two volumes and is the most demanding of his three great late period works, along with The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors. Volume one presents the first half of the story, told largely from the perspective of the young Italian prince who marries an American heiress.

Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince of an old Roman family, is engaged to marry Maggie Verver, the only daughter of the enormously wealthy American collector Adam Verver. Maggie is intelligent, devoted to her father, and entirely innocent of the actual world. Through Maggie’s friend Charlotte Stant, who has come to England for the wedding, Amerigo discovers that he and Charlotte had once been lovers in Rome, an attachment broken off because neither had any money. They have a long conversation in a London antique shop where they are searching for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a golden bowl that turns out to be flawed by a hidden crack, and they decide not to buy it. The conversation in the shop is the moment when the moral situation that will dominate the rest of the novel is established.

The first volume covers the marriage of Amerigo and Maggie, the subsequent marriage of Charlotte to Maggie’s father Adam Verver, and the gradual development of the situation that James called the four square garden party of his great late novel. Amerigo and Charlotte, married to father and daughter respectively, find themselves increasingly thrown together while Maggie and Adam pursue their unusually close relationship as parent and child. Volume one closes with the four characters in a kind of equilibrium that volume two will systematically disrupt.

The late style is in full force. Sentences extend across whole paragraphs. The narrative voice circles its subject from many angles before committing to anything. For readers willing to give the book the time, the reward is one of the most morally serious novels in English. Volume two completes the story.