The Sacred Fount: Novel / Edition 1

by Henry James

Overview

One of Henry James’s most mesmerizing and unusual novels, The Sacred Fount (1901) has for its scene a weekend party at the great English country house Newmarch. Here James leads the reader down a bizarre garden path. The Sacred Fount––his only novel to employ a first-person narrator––places us in the hands of an obsessive novelist (never named and never described, but perhaps familiar), who detects alarming changes in his acquaintances. A woman known for her élan has lost her poise, a dull man is charming; a friend is suddenly aged, a plain woman sparkles. Where one improves, another seems to suffer. With “plunges of insight,” “as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird,” the narrator stalks his fellow guests through the weekend, avidly trying to make sense of what he comes to believe are actual exchanges of life force. “The sacred fount,” as R.P. Blackmur noted, “is the mystery of the power that passes among us, depleting or restoring us, in friendship, in love, even in more public relations …. [Here] is the beautiful, the critical job of making that mystery manifest.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811212793
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/1995
Series:	Revived Modern Classic Series , #790
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Henry James (1843–1916) was an American novelist and literary critic. Between 1866 and 1869, he wrote for Nation and Atlantic. When he moved to Paris, he began writing for the New York Tribune. During World War I, James worked as a volunteer among the displaced and wounded. He passed away in 1916.

Date of Birth:

April 15, 1843

Date of Death:

February 28, 1916

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Attended school in France and Switzerland; Harvard Law School, 1862-63

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; General editor's preface; General chronology of James's life and writings; Introduction; Contemporary reception of The Sacred Fount; Textual introduction; Chronology of composition and production; Bibliography; The Sacred Fount; Glossary of foreign words and phrases; Notes; Textual variants; Emendations.

Editorial Reviews

James's 1901 novel is his only first-person narrative. The action is seen through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, a novelist attending a weekend party at an English estate. As the story progresses, the narrator begins to detect vast changes in his fellow guests as they begin taking on each other's personalities.

Library Journal