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After her parents' bitter and brutal divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself pushed back and forth by her selfish mother, Ida, and her vain father, Beale, who value her only as a tool for provoking one another. And when both parents move on and remarry, Maisie - solitary, observant and wise beyond her years - is drawn into a messy and very adult world of lies and betrayal; until she is finally forced to choose her own way of independent living.
"The Portrait of a Lady" is the title of this masterpiece. Isabel Archer - beautiful, young and spirited - visits her wealthy relatives in England, rejects marriage proposals by two more or less worthy suitors, inherits a fortune and then is manipulated into marriage to one of the most cruel creatures imaginable: Gilbert Osmond... This is just scratching the surface of this colossal, monumental work, so rich in both its prose, its characters and its many, many themes.
Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner Emma Thompson lends her immense talent and experienced voice to Henry James' Gothic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw. When a governess is hired to care for two children at a British country estate, she begins to sense an otherworldly presence around the grounds. Are they really ghosts she's seeing? Or is something far more sinister at work?
Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is the last completed novel of Henry James. In it, the widowed American Adam Verver is in Europe with his daughter Maggie. They are rich, finely appreciative of European art and culture, and deeply attached to each other. Maggie has all the innocent charm of so many of Jamess young American heroines. She is engaged to Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince; he must marry money, and as his name suggests, an American heiress is the perfect solution.
Eugenia, an American expatriate brought up in Europe, arrives in rural New England with her charming brother Felix, hoping to find a wealthy second husband after the collapse of her marriage to a German prince. Their exotic, sophisticated airs cause quite a stir with their affluent, God-fearing American cousins, the Wentworth's - and provoke the disapproval of their uncle, suspicious of foreign influences.
Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.
After her parents' bitter and brutal divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself pushed back and forth by her selfish mother, Ida, and her vain father, Beale, who value her only as a tool for provoking one another. And when both parents move on and remarry, Maisie - solitary, observant and wise beyond her years - is drawn into a messy and very adult world of lies and betrayal; until she is finally forced to choose her own way of independent living.
"The Portrait of a Lady" is the title of this masterpiece. Isabel Archer - beautiful, young and spirited - visits her wealthy relatives in England, rejects marriage proposals by two more or less worthy suitors, inherits a fortune and then is manipulated into marriage to one of the most cruel creatures imaginable: Gilbert Osmond... This is just scratching the surface of this colossal, monumental work, so rich in both its prose, its characters and its many, many themes.
Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner Emma Thompson lends her immense talent and experienced voice to Henry James' Gothic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw. When a governess is hired to care for two children at a British country estate, she begins to sense an otherworldly presence around the grounds. Are they really ghosts she's seeing? Or is something far more sinister at work?
Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is the last completed novel of Henry James. In it, the widowed American Adam Verver is in Europe with his daughter Maggie. They are rich, finely appreciative of European art and culture, and deeply attached to each other. Maggie has all the innocent charm of so many of Jamess young American heroines. She is engaged to Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince; he must marry money, and as his name suggests, an American heiress is the perfect solution.
Eugenia, an American expatriate brought up in Europe, arrives in rural New England with her charming brother Felix, hoping to find a wealthy second husband after the collapse of her marriage to a German prince. Their exotic, sophisticated airs cause quite a stir with their affluent, God-fearing American cousins, the Wentworth's - and provoke the disapproval of their uncle, suspicious of foreign influences.
Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.
Illusion and love - two of James' favourite things - grin thorough this collection of funny and wicked tales. The illusion of social class, a favourite stamping ground for James, is explored in the glittering social comedy "The Real Thing", first published in 1892, in which an artist attempts vainly to capture the nature of aristocracy via painting what he takes to be 'real' members of that social group.
During a trip to Europe, wealthy American businessman Christopher Newman proposes marriage to the scintillating and beautiful aristocrat Claire de Cintré. To his dismay, he comes up against the machinations of her impoverished but proud family, who find Newman to be a vulgar example of the American privileged class. Brilliantly combining elements of comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama, this tale of thwarted desire vividly contrasts nineteenth-century American and European manners.
Henry James' short but much acclaimed suspenseful novel, set in Venice, concerns an American editor's determination to acquire a collection of unpublished letters to the former mistress of a famous deceased poet. This Miss bordereau is now very elderly, living modestly in a dilpidated old palazzo with her shy, awkward and uncomely niece Tita, an unwitting "pawn" in the plot.
With the exception of the terrible retreat from Afghanistan, none of England's many little wars have been so fatal in proportion to the number of those engaged as our first expedition to Burma. The Burman policy of carrying off every boat on the river, laying waste the whole country, and driving away the inhabitants and the herds, maintained our army as prisoners in Rangoon through the first wet season; and caused the loss of half the white officers and men first sent there.
Here is Henry James' dark comedic masterpiece, written in the final period of his life. Lambert Strether goes to Paris to bring back Chad, son of the wealthy New England widow he plans to marry. But he gradually comes to feel that life in Paris may hold more for him than in Woollett, Massachusetts.
Hudson is a young law student in Northampton, Massachusetts, who shows such surprising ability as a sculptor that the rich Rowland Mallett, visiting a cousin in Northampton, decides to stake him to several years of study in Rome, then a center of expatriate American society. The story has to do not only with Roderick's growth as an artist and the problems it brings, but also as a man susceptible to his new environment, and indeed his occasional rivalries with his American friend and patron.
The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, the story follows Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand. Her choice will be crucial, and she is not wanting for advice, whether from the generous-spirited Ralph Touchett or the charming Madame Merle.
Published in 1878, portrays the courtship of the beautiful American girl Daisy Miller by Frederick Winterbourne. Winterbourne's pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates they meet in Switzerland and Italy. The the novel coments on the contrast between American and European society that is common to James's work.
In three beautifully crafted, dramatic acts, James's little-known novel unravels the painfully complicated emotional bonds which exist within a group of friends and lovers connected by two neighboring homes as they fight publicly for preferment, reciprocation, and successful marriage....
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Clarissa visits London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton for whom she felt strongly.
"Silence" (dt. Schweigen) ist der wichtigste Roman des gefeierten japanischen Autors Shusaku Endo. Er verursachte nach seiner Veröffentlichung im Jahr 1966 eine große Kontroverse in Japan. Shusaku Endo, ein japanischer Katholik, erzählt die Geschichte zweier portugiesischer Missionare, die im siebzehnten Jahrhundert in Japan versuchen, die dortige unterdrückte christliche Bewegung zu unterstützen.
Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated work is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the story mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh.
As a dramatic family quarrel unfolds, the hesitating Fleda is drawn in, yet she remains reluctant to captivate Owen, who seems as attracted to her as she is to him.
In The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James created a work of exquisite ambiguity as three women fight for the allegiance of one weak-willed man.
A brilliant reading of a lesser-known, but fascinating tale of love and greed in 19th Century England. Ms. O'Brien has a keen understanding of James's complex style and characters, whom she subtly and distinctly delineates in this excellent recording.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful
The Spoils of Poynton has an unusual topic for a novel-the obsession with objects. Considering how the love of, and possession of "things" is central to so many people's lives, it is odd that it does not figure more importantly in novels. The theft of "things" and the desire for material wealth provide the subject of a great many novels, but the actual obsessive delectation of one's possessions rarely provides the plot motivation. Maybe it requires a genius like James for such an undertaking. "The Spoils of Poynton" with its heroic battle to save the "Spoils" from the Philistines is wonderfully tragicomic.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
James is brilliant. The narrative is provocative and darkly beautiful. Maureen O'Brien breathes life into this classic. I loved it.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
Would you consider the audio edition of The Spoils of Poynton to be better than the print version?
Not exactly. But I think it enriches the print version so that I notice things I didn't while reading.
What did you like best about this story?
The mystery of the power of collecting objects. The description of Poynton itself. The main character's aesthetic sense. Her honor. Henry James' brilliant writing.
Have you listened to any of Maureen O'Brien’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I listened to What Maisie Knew which was incredibly good. I thought that one couldn't be bested but Spoils is just as good. I will now listen to Middlemarch. I wish she did more. I am not so interested in listening to Lawrence but probably will because she is so good. However I wish she would do more Henry James novels. She is one of your truly great readers.
Any additional comments?
PLEASE more novels read by Maureen O'Brien.
Portrait of a Lady, Turn of the Screw, The Golden Bowl.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
This is corridos study of the fat of attachment to things has on one.
Study in the weaknesses and strength of human beings.
I don't know is it worth so tragic are just very cathartic.
But what I do know is that marine O'Brien is one of the most gifted narrators I've heard. I'd be tempted to listen to almost anything she narrates.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I read this for a class in Brit Lit. Simply because it's Henry James, it's not the worst of the bunch. It is rather long winded for the outcome. The psychological portraits seem apt. The legal stuff a tad unbelievable, but probably true. To me it all rests in one idea. Mrs. Gareth's son does not have the kind of adoration a son should have for his mother, so she is being ousted by the despicable woman he wants to marry. The woman Mrs.Gareth wants him to marry is too morally sound to do what must be done to displace the fiance, so much chaos ensues.
The ending is troubling for an absence of explanation. I like a cliffhanger, but I feel there was not enough information in the characters to give me even a guess at the perpetrator of the final act. It's almost as if James threw up his hands in disgust at his characters and took action with his pen to free them from a final decision.
Anyway, it's worth the credit; though it lacks humor, sustained tension and, except for a final action by Owen and a last page event, it also lacks surprise.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
This story kept me guessing right up until the final moments...I don't want to give the ending away so won't talk about the content too much beyond saying that it was a real, human, love story - would highly recommend both the narrator and the book.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful