Genevieve C. Holloway – författare

A countess with no fortune and an unreadable face marries an English lord who dies at Venice, and the palace where it happened is now a hotel, with one room nobody sleeps in twice. Collins wrote it in 1878, deep into the laudanum, and it is his most frankly supernatural book - a detective plot that gives up and lets the ghost win.

A rich patron brings a brilliant young American sculptor to Rome to make him great, and watches him instead discover women, idleness and his own limits. James's first real novel, written at thirty-two, invents the subject he would work for forty years: the American of talent set loose in Europe with no idea what it costs.

A young American woman inherits a fortune she did not ask for and is thereby made free to choose - which is the trap. James thought this his most perfect design: an heiress, three suitors, an expatriate circle in Florence and Rome, and a marriage entered into for the noblest reason and the worst judgment. He revised it heavily in old age, and readers still argue about which version to read. This edition brings together the complete work - both volumes in one.