Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-cen[...]
Henry James' highly charged study of adultery, jealousy and possession, "The Golden Bowl" is edited with an introduction and notes by Ruth Bernard Yeazell in "Penguin Classics". Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, and her widowed father Adam, a billionaire collector of objets d'art, lead a life[...]