Recommendations
Books Like The Wings of the Dove
What to read after The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (1902) is the most emotionally devastating of his late masterworks — Milly Theale's goodness, Kate Croy's scheme, and Merton Densher's complicity; the 'wings of the dove' that transform everyone they touch. If you were drawn to its moral intricacy and its portrait of sacrifice, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Ambassadors
by Henry James
Lambert Strether in Paris — James's own favorite among his novels and the companion to The Wings of the Dove in the late major phase; published one year after The Wings of the Dove; where The Wings of the Dove is organized around a scheme and its moral consequences, The Ambassadors is organized around a recognition and its emotional consequences; James considered The Ambassadors his most perfectly constructed novel
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The Golden Bowl
by Henry James
Maggie Verver and the Prince in London — the third of the three great late novels; where The Wings of the Dove ends in the failure of a scheme, The Golden Bowl ends in Maggie's quietly devastating triumph; the most demanding of the three and, for many readers, the greatest; the companion volume to complete the late phase
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer's journey from American freedom to European imprisonment — James's first major novel and the essential predecessor to the late phase; where Milly Theale faces her fate with the generosity of the truly good, Isabel Archer faces hers with the pride of the truly intelligent; both are portraits of American women destroyed by the European world they entered
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Washington Square
by Henry James
Catherine Sloper in 1840s New York — the best starting point for readers who found The Wings of the Dove their first James and want to go further; the same Jamesian situation (a young woman placed at the mercy of people who do not adequately value her) in its most direct and accessible form; the best preparation for the complex late work
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Newland Archer, the Countess Olenska, and the New York social world that destroys what it cannot control — Wharton was Henry James's closest literary friend and The Age of Innocence is the novel most fully in the tradition of James's international theme; the same moral intelligence, the same suppressed feeling, the same social pressure; won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by the social world she was raised to inhabit — the companion to The Wings of the Dove in American women's fiction of the early twentieth century; where Milly Theale is destroyed by a scheme she is too generous to suspect, Lily Bart is destroyed by a society she is too proud to accommodate; both are tragedies of women whose finest qualities make them most vulnerable
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler, who gave his emotional life to an ideal of professional dignity and recognizes too late what he sacrificed — the twentieth-century novel most directly in the tradition of Jamesian suppression; where James filters everything through consciousness and what is suppressed is almost said, Ishiguro filters everything through a narrator who cannot quite bring himself to see what he has lost
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The Europeans
by Henry James
Two European cousins — the Baroness Münster and her brother Felix Young — who visit their American relatives in New England in the 1840s; the lightest and most comic of James's novels and one of the most accessible; a perfect companion after The Wings of the Dove for readers who want to see the international theme in its most benign form
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