The Princess Casamassima

The first scholarly edition of this major nineteenth-century novel, exploring anarchist activity, cultural crisis, and their causes.

The novel is essential reading for scholars, critics and general readers interested in the political and social crisis of late-Victorian Britain, the means by which writers of the time represented it, and the ways in which subsequent readers have interpreted it in relation to their own times.The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in three volumes in 1886, The Princess Casamassima follows Hyacinth Robinson, a young London craftsman who carries the stigma of his illegitimate birth, and his French mother's murder of his patrician English father. Deeply impressed by the poverty around him, he is driven to association with political dissidents and anarchists including the charismatic Princess Casamassima - who embodies the problems of personal and political loyalty by which Hyacinth is progressively torn apart. This edition is the first to provide a full account of the context in which the book was composed and received. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand its nuanced historical, cultural and literary references, and its complex textual history.