A young London reviewer writes a clever notice of the novelist Hugh Vereker, only to hear Vereker dismiss it: every critic has missed the single intention that runs through all his books like a figure in a Persian carpet. The narrator, his friend George Corvick and Corvick’s fiancée Gwendolen Erme become obsessed with finding it.
James’s sly, endlessly debated parable about reading, criticism and literary secrets, a favourite of literary theorists. Download the free EPUB.