A private life of Henry James

In 1894 a middle-aged gentlemen tried to dron a boatload of women's dresses in the Venetian Lagoon, prodding them vainly with his gondolier's pole as they balloned about him. The man was Henry James and the dresses belonged to the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had fallen to her death from her Venice window three months before. James's elusive friendship with Fenmore echoed his mysterious relationship with the charismatic Minnie Temple, who died twenty years earlier, in 1870. Both women haunted him and only after deaths did he commit himself. Minnie inspired the heroines of PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, while Fenimore resurfaced in his stories, and his vision of the writer's life. Lyndall Gordon's extraordinary book traces the creative force of an ideal, an absence - and in the process traces the untold biography, the story of a writers imagination.