Golden Bowl, The

Golden Bowl, The, the last completed novel of H. James, published 1904.

The widowed American Adam Verver is in Europe with his daughter Maggie, who has all the innocent charm of so many of James's young American heroines. She is engaged to Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince who must marry into money. The golden bowl, first seen in a London curio shop, is symbolic of the relationship between the main characters and of the world in which they move; its perfect surface conceals a flaw.

Also in Europe is an old friend of Maggie's, Charlotte Stant, and Maggie is blindly ignorant of the fact that she and the prince are lovers. Maggie and Amerigo are married and have a son, but Maggie remains dependent for real intimacy on her father, and she and Amerigo grow increasingly apart. Maggie decides to find her father a wife and her choice falls on Charlotte. The affair with the prince continues and Adam Verver seems to Charlotte to be a convenient match. When Maggie finally comes into possession of the golden bowl the flaw is revealed to her, and, inadvertently, the truth about Amerigo and Charlotte. Fanny Ashingham (an older woman, aware of the truth from the beginning) deliberately breaks the bowl, and this marks the end of Maggie's ‘innocence’. Abstaining from outcry and outrage, she takes the reins and manoeuvres people and events. She realizes that to be a wife she must cease to be a daughter. Adam Verver and the unhappy Charlotte are banished forever to America, and the new Maggie will establish a real marriage with Amerigo.