The Portrait of a Lady, arguably James's greatest novel, introduces us to Isabel Archer, a beautiful, vivacious, and independently minded American woman who travels to Europe and is seduced by its society. Her circle includes her terminally ill but deeply loving cousin, Ralph; the noble and adoring Lord Warburton; her witty and sarcastic friend Henrietta Stackpole; the meticulous aesthete Gilbert Osmond; the mysterious Madame Merle; and Caspar Goodwood, her passionate American suitor. Negotiating between the life each of them offers and represents, Isabel becomes part of one of the best books written about women's choices.

Movie buffs will be particularly interested in this volume, for all the novels in it have been made into films. The Bostonians was a Merchant-Ivory production in 1984. It starred Vanessa Redgrave as the feminist Olive Chancellor, sparring with southern gentleman Christopher Reeve! The Portrait of a Lady (1996), with Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich, was Jane Campion's opulent follow-up to The Piano. And Washington Square has been made into two major movies: the 1997 version starred Jennifer Jason- Leigh and Albert Finney; but the classic adaptation was William Wyler's 1949 film The Heiress, which starred Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins, and Olivia de Havilland in an Oscar-winning role. It's a real treat to read a superb book and then see how major filmmakers transform it into cinema that is compelling and entertaining it its own right. --Raphael Shargel

James opens his book with an impressionistic overture, which can be slightly off-putting: he seems too intent on leaping beyond the dry donnée of American life into pure abstraction. But readers shouldn't be discouraged. Even in the opening pages the author manages some brilliant snapshots, like this description of New Hampshire's Saco River: "The rich, full lapse of the river, the perfect brownness, clear and deep, as of liquid agate, in its wide swirl, the large indifferent ease in its pace and motion, as of some great benevolent institution smoothly working; all this, with the sense of the deepening autumn about, gave I scarce know what pastoral nobleness to the scene, something raising it out of the reach of even the most restless of analysts." And once James begins his journey proper up and down the Eastern seaboard, he delivers one amazing page after another. He doesn't, of course, care for everything he sees--the skyscrapers of Manhattan strike him as vertical monstrosities, and he lets loose with more than one politically incorrect shaft at the minority population.

What appalls him the most, though, is the Almighty Dollar, which he perceives as "the preliminary American postulate," the very bedrock of New World life: "This basis is that of active pecuniary gain and of active pecuniary gain only--that of one's making the conditions so triumphantly pay that the prices, the manners, the other inconveniences, take their place as a friction it is comparatively easy to salve, wounds directly treatable with the wash of gold." Some will argue that the fussbudget author had spent too much time in England, where money remained a dirty word until after the Second World War. Others may find his diagnosis eerily prescient. In any case, The American Scene remains required reading for anybody interested in U.S. history, Henry James, or the incredible evolution of the compound sentence. --James Marcus

The author of over forty books, Edith Wharton (18621937) won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence.

Henry James (18431916) wrote numerous stories, essays, plays, and novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Philosophy was in a state of unrest, with old alliances breaking up and new ones forming, and was ripe for a more fruitful reformulation of its traditional questions. Intellectualism, philosophical and scientific, was waning, making room for the emergence of an empiricism congenial to humane values. As reflected in the letters of this period, James comes to recognize that Dewey and the Chicago school were his allies and that the Frenchman Henri Bergson was moving in the same direction.Consequently, Bergson is the major new correspondent of the present volume, and, because he emerges during this period as James's leading supporter, Ferdinand Schiller is another dominant correspondent.

Often boisterous and irreverent, Schiller saw himself as a general about to overwhelm an aged and sleepy, but still dangerous, enemy. James, in the meantime, had to call upon all of his diplomatic skills to keep on good terms with the people Schiller irritated, while remaining Schiller's friend and defender. Scholars will find much material in this volume that will help them judge whether the common view of pragmatism as a capricious subjectivism largely reflected a widespread lack of respect for Schiller.

While continuing his involvement with anti-imperialism, James takes a more critical stance toward existing social conditions during this period, proclaiming his admiration for the small and insisting on the connection between great size and social evil. In 1904 he tours the American South. There are hints that he was acting as a scout for his brother Henry, which perhaps caused William James to see more of the meanness and shabbiness of the region than he would have otherwise.

Along with Bergson and Schiller, prominent intellectuals represented in this volume include Théodore Flournoy, Wincenty Lutoslawski, Carl Stumpf, Hugo Münsterberg, Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Lodge, John Dewey, George Herbert Palmer, Charles William Eliot, James Mark Baldwin, and Edwin Godkin.