ABSTRACT
Magnificent, chilling, impassioned and perverse, The Golden Bowl has had a striking impact on its readers, drawing them in to such an extent that strong critical identifications are made with its characters - themselves judged in a way so impassioned as to suggest an impact beyond the ordinarily fictional - and its elaborate syntax finds itself faintly mirrored in the prose of its criticism. In some cases it has driven its commentators to distraction, both in the colloquial sense of that phrase and in the sense that certain of its readers have found James's last completed novel a text to which it is impossible to pay any attention.
