The Master

by Colm Toibin (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $4.48

  It is January 1895 and Henry James's play Guy Domville, from which he hoped to make a fortune, has failed on the London stage. The Master opens with this disaster and takes James through the next five years, as having found his dream retreat, he moves to Rye in Sussex. It is there he writes his short masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw, in which he used much of his own life as an exile in England and a member of one of the great eccentric American families. He is impelled by the need to work and haunted by sections of his own past, including his own failure to fight in the American Civil War, the golden summer of 1865, and the death of his sister Alice. He is watchful and witty, relishing the England in which he has come to live and regretting the New England he has left.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.25

  In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master Colm Toibin captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart.