Kate Croy is a young woman obliged by genteel poverty to live with her rich and snobbish aunt, Mrs Lowder, who plans that Kate should marry into money. Kate herself has other ideas and is already secretly engaged to a journalist named Merton Densher. Milly Theale is a rich young American, slowly succumbing to a fatal illness, who arrives in London and becomes Kate's friend. Kate, however, sees in Milly a means of solving her problems and of giving herself the opportunity to marry Densher and to be happy. When Milly, advised by her doctor that she should travel, journeys to Venice and takes up residence in a decaying palazzo on the Grand Canal, Kate encourages her fiance to follow her and to woo her in the hope that they can marry. Milly's last months will be made happy and, after her death, Densher will be a rich widower. He and Kate can then marry and live in comfort. The deception, which Kate convinces herself is harmless and to the benefit of everyone, is revealed through the spitefulness of another of Milly's suitors and leads to tragedy for every one of the main characters. Henry James's later novels are often said to be over-elaborated and difficult to read but The Wings of the Dove shows how wrong this judgment is. James takes the relatively simple, even melodramatic, story of an innocent young woman, facing early death and vulnerable to the exploitation of those more worldly and ruthless than she is, and turns it into a subtle and moving analysis of what the true value of life is. It is not always an easy read - the density and complexity of James's prose in which more is always going on beneath the surface than first appears can makes demands on the reader - but it is ultimately a rewarding one.

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