The Secrets and Silences of The Golden Bowl
1904
Dinitia Smith on Henry James’s Difficult, Powerful Final Novel
18 MARCH 2022
The Golden Bowl is a novel about secrets, about what happens to an immensely wealthy family when its secrets begin to rise to the surface. It is James’s most difficult work, an interweaving of filaments of words and sentences, luring the reader on as he begins to sense the eroticism and cruelty embedded in it. The secrets in James’s novel are made more awful because they are never explicitly defined, the people often silent, mirroring the book’s atmosphere of concealment and secrecy.