(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its fullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and the magnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceit and betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about the frailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of need and desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these three characters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-lit piazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almost unprecedented in his work. Under its brilliant, coruscating surfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical and psychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers an unfettered vision of our civilization and its discontents. It represents a culmination of James's art and, as such, of the art of the novel itself.

From the Hardcover edition.

亨利·詹姆斯（Henry James），19世紀美國繼霍桑、麥爾維爾之後偉大的小說傢，也是美國乃至世界文學史上的大文豪。著有長篇小說：《一個美國人》《一位女士的畫像》《鴿翼》《使節》《金碗》等。他的創作對20世紀崛起的現代派及後現代派文學有著非常巨大的影響，是心理分析小說的開創者之一，是20世紀小說的意識流寫作技巧的先驅。

蕭緒津，1942年8月齣生於天津，祖籍奉化。1965年9月進入教育係統工作，先後在寜波市職工業餘學校、寜波市第十二中學、寜波市師範學校和寜波中學擔任英語教師。2002年10月退休。中學高級教師。