The Princess Casamassima

To buy this book for less from the Wiseblood Books website, visit http://www.wisebloodbooks.com/wiseblood-catalogue.htmlThere are degrees of feeling-the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word-the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is those moved in this latter fashion who 'get most' out of all that happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their record, as...
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To buy this book for less from the Wiseblood Books website, visit http://www.wisebloodbooks.com/wiseblood-catalogue.htmlThere are degrees of feeling-the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word-the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is those moved in this latter fashion who 'get most' out of all that happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get most. Their being finely aware-as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware-makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them. -Henry James on protagonist Hyacinth RobinsonTHE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA is the story of a brilliant, tormented young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. Brought up in poverty, Hyacinth possesses a heightened aesthetic sensitivity that makes the suffering and squalor around him even more reprehensible. Soon after he commits himself to terrorist action, he meets the Princess Casamassima, and her beauty, her aristocratic, wealthy world, bring him to doubt his former faith in radical politics. Unlike the rest of James' novels, THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA deals directly with a violent political subject, a subject intimately familiar to us today. *This Wiseblood Classic includes James' Preface to the 1908 New York Edition!Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope.Our WISEBLOOD CLASSICS series brings hard-to-find works back into being and introduces great books to a new generation. Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.com. We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of truth.