Penguin Books Australia

'I don't want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do'

'The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window where, at the sight of me, it stopped short'

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...

Henry James's third novel is an exploration of his most powerful, perennial theme-the clash between European and American cultures, the Old World and the New

Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde.  Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage.  When...

'He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.'
- Graham Greene

This story of the alliance between Italian aristocracy and American millionaires is 'a work unique among all [James's] novels: it is [his] only novel in which things come out right for his characters ...he had finally resolved the questions, curious and passionate, that had kept him at his desk on his inquiries into the process of living. He could now make his peace with America—and he could...

The illegitimate and impoverished son of a dressmaker and a nobleman, Hyacinth Robinson has grown up with a strong sense of beauty that heightens his acute sympathy for the inequalities that surround him. Drawn into a secret circle of radical politics he makes a rash vow to commit a violent act of terrorism. But when the Princess Casamassima - beautiful, clever and bored - takes him up and introduces...

Making her debut in London society, Nanda Brookenham is being groomed for the marriage market. Thrust suddenly into the superficial and immoral circle that surrounds her mother, the innocent but independent-minded young woman even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Only an elderly bachelor, Mr Longdon, is immune to this world of greed and scheming...

Published in 1886, The Bostonians begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, a young Mississippi lawyer in search of a career.  Through his cousin, Olive Chancellor, Ransom comes to meet Verena, the beautiful daughter of a charlatan faith-healer and showman.  When they hear Verena talk, Olive hopes to win the girl over to the feminist cause, Ransom is attracted to her looks, and a...

'You think . . . that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?'

In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and...