The Wings of the Dove

A new edition of Henry James's classic novel featuring a new afterword.

Milly Theale, an American heiress in London, is young, hungry for life, and terminally ill. There she meets the dazzling beauty Kate Croy. Unbeknownst to Milly, Kate is madly in love with an old acquaintance of hers, Merton Densher, a young journalist who has everything a woman could want?except money.

Intensely aware of her new friend’s fate and coveting her fortune, Kate secretly spurs Merton to seduce and marry Milly. But their scheme to inherit her wealth does not go according to plan, and Kate and Merton learn that deceit alters love, and love, deceit.

With an Introduction by Brenda Wineapple
and a New Afterword

Henry James (1843?1916), born in New York City, was the son of religious philosopher Henry James Sr. and brother of the psychologist and philosopher William James. His early life was spent in America, but he was frequently taken to Europe during his adolescence. He lived in Newport, went briefly to Harvard, and, in 1864, began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines. In 1869, and then in 1872?74, he paid visits to Europe and began his first novel, Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875, he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola and wrote The American (1877). In December 1876, he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. Other famous works include Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and three large novels of the new century, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1905, he revisited the United States and wrote The American Scene (1907). During his career, he also wrote many woks of criticism and travel. Although old and ailing, he threw himself into war work in 1914, and in 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject. In 1916, King George V conferred the Order of Merit on him.

Brenda Wineapple is the author of such acclaimed books as Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848?1877 (a New York Times Notable Book), White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as a New York Times Notable book), and Hawthorne: A Life (Ambassador Award for the Best Biography of the Year). She teaches in the MFA programs at the New School and Columbia University’s School of the Arts.