The Wings of the Dove: Volume 1

The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 is the first volume of Henry James’s 1902 novel, one of the three great masterworks of his late period along with The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The novel was first published in a two volume format and the present volume gives the first half of the story, taking the reader through the establishment of the major characters and the slow setting of the situation that the second volume will resolve.

The novel opens in London with Kate Croy, a beautiful and intelligent young Englishwoman of good family but no money. She is secretly engaged to Merton Densher, a journalist she loves but cannot marry openly because of her family’s expectations. Kate’s aunt, the wealthy and dominant Mrs Lowder, has decided that Kate must marry a man with means and is opposed to Densher. Into this situation arrives Milly Theale, a young American heiress traveling in Europe with her older friend Mrs Stringham. Milly is enormously rich and is also, as the reader gradually understands, terminally ill, although the precise nature of her illness is kept deliberately vague.

The first volume sets up the moral situation that will dominate the second. Kate sees in Milly’s wealth and Milly’s illness an opportunity. If Densher were to court Milly, and if Milly were to die leaving him her fortune, Kate and Densher could finally marry openly with the financial independence they need. The setting up of this terrible idea, and the way it grows almost imperceptibly out of conversations that never quite name what is being proposed, is the great achievement of the first volume. The late James style is in full operation. Sentences extend and qualify themselves across paragraphs and pages.

The volume runs about three hundred pages. For readers approaching the late James for the first time, this is the most ambitious of the great late novels and the most rewarding. It requires patience but the reward is one of the most morally serious novels ever written. The second volume completes the story.