Henry James

'Her thesis is that there were two women in James's life whose influence was so profound that they can be seen as partners, even collaborators in his art. Their ties to him were not sexual but imaginative, and their force was exerted posthumously: they were ghostly collaborators . . . all Jamesians will want to read Lyndall Gordon, for the breadth of her knowledge and sympathies, for the way she makes us think again about Henry James, and for her finely researched and beautifully presented pictures of the American background from which James, his cousin Minny and his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson came' Claire TomalinJames's friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson ended in 1894 when he tried to drown a boatload of her dresses in the Venetian lagoon; she had fallen to her death three months before. It was an elusive friendship that echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who had died twenty years earlier. From their graves, these two women haunted his imagination and his fiction, inspiring the creation of his heroines. 'Wonderfully full-blooded. A brilliant idea superbly enjoyable material, much of unfamiliar, all of it stimulating' Philip Horne, Guardian'Imaginative and risky . . . A magnificent, important book' Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review von Gordon, Lyndall