It does so with dazzling glimpses of Parisian theater and of London aestheticism, as articulated by the flamboyant and idealistic Gabriel Nash.

The Tragic Muse (1890) explores with a topical realism not usually found in James the conflicts between art and politics, society and the Bohemian life. James portrays the collision of easily shocked Old World propriety and self-assured New World naiveté with benevolent affection and spirited delight. His published report imperils her engagement to Gaston Probert, whose family is outraged by the airing of its secrets. The Reverberator (1888) is a swiftly paced comic novel named after a newspaper that caters to the American public’s appetite for the “society news of every quarter of the globe.” Francie Dosson, the free-spirited daughter of a wealthy Boston family, innocently provides gossip to George Flack, a “young commercial American” who writes for the paper. Assassination plots, sexual betrayals, murder, suicide, and the fierce play of conflicting loyalties-all these bring into play an intricate abundance of attendant figures, like the rakish Captain Sholto and the appealing but faithless Millicent Henning.

Possibly to save Hyacinth, she becomes romantically involved with his fellow conspirator Paul Muniment, a calculating political operative, idealistic and treacherous by turns. The novel’s hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is torn between his loyalty to revolutionary causes-for which he is about to commit an act of violence that may cost him his life-and his taste for the artistic side of aristocratic culture, represented in part by the beautiful, wealthy, compassionate, and yet deceptive Princess of the title. The action ranges from palaces to slums, from London to Paris to Venice and back again. It is a political novel in which anarchists and terrorists conspire within a fin de siècle world of opulence and glamour.

The Princess Casamassima was published in 1886, a year that saw riots of the unemployed in London. The three novels in this Library of America volume from Henry James’s middle period explore some historical and social dilemmas that belong as much to our time as to his own.

The american by henry james