Overview

Surrounded by artists, writers and musicians who constituted her court in Boston as in Venice, Isabella Stewart Gardner, a passionate art collector with enormous funds, was as revered and sought after as royalty. Henry James had a real affection for her, and was inspired by the rich and powerful Mrs Gardner and her magnificent pearls, as well as by the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, for his novel The Wings of the Dove made into a film in 1997. Mrs Gardner was to recreate a larger than life version of Palazzo Barbaro in Boston, which is now the Isabella Gardner Museum. These letters add another dimension to what we know of Henry James long relationship with Venice and the Palazzo Barbaro.

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9781901285833

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Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry James. Edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Pushkin Press, GBP 12) The novelist Henry James wrote many letters and had a lifelong attachment to Venice - his small masterpiece, The Aspern Papers is set there. When he wrote The Wings of the Dove, he was partly inspired by a Venetian house, the Palazzo Barbaro, partly by one of the great American art collectors and magnificent women of her day, Mrs Isabella Stewart Gardner. She recreated the Palazzo in Boston - it is now a museum, named after her. James had a long correspondence with her as they both travelled widely, he mainly in Europe, she to places as remote as Japan, Cambodia and Java. Both had a great interest in the visual arts, though James was not always sympathetic to the collectors' passion for acquiring rather than appreciating. His letters to anyone are always worth reading, lively, brilliantly descriptive, self-revelatory and those to the rich and somewhat eccentric Mrs Gardner are no exception.

His fictions... what drives them is a force as mysteriously elusive as art, known as money. It's this interaction between artistic (or moral) beauty and the brutal workings of power which make James so magnificent an artist -- Terry Eagleton The Guardian The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr Henry James work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion -- Joseph Conrad Henry James: An Appreciation' James is one of the most satisfying of all letter-writers because of thte endlessly surprising plasticity with which he handles the language of even his most trifling communications... and may our correspondence be as lovingly edited and presented as it is here by Dottoressa Rosella Mamoli Zorzi of Venice University -- Jonathan Keates Spectator

Author Information

Henry James was born on April 15, 1843 in New York City into a wealthy family. In his youth James travelled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris , Bologna and Bonn. At the age of nineteen he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law. After living in Paris, where he was contributor to The New York Tribune, James moved to England, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex. He died in Rye on February 28, 1916.

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