The Golden Bowl, James's last completed novel, presents the reader with a paradox; it is the culmination of his life's work and only James could have written it, and yet it is curiously unlike anything that preceded it. Like Shakespeare's Tempest, which it in some ways resembles, it insists on being read as a final work, and like The Tempest it is concerned with treachery and forgiveness – but, despite the Shakespearian echoes, James is fundamentally dealing with far more ancient material. For all its slow unfolding – not so much leisurely as suspense-building – his plot has all the tightness, balance and inevitability of a Greek tragedy. We have to conflate these two dramatic analogies and imagine Maggie Verver as a Miranda in the predicament of Medea to realize the full complexity of James's theme. But Charlotte too is Medea; like a palindrome, the novel can be read in both directions, and either way it provides us with a riddle and a mystery, something that we must solve and something that in the end we can only wonder at.

James's novels tend to start deceptively. In the opening chapters of The Golden Bowl we are given a deceptive likeness to his previous novel. As in The Wings of the Dove, the plot centres on an American princess, but where Milly's title was only a poetic way of expressing the crude fact that she had money, in Maggie Verver's case money has bought her a real prince.