Other Fiction James, Henry: The Golden Bowl. V1.1 12 Nov 2013

[GibbinR]

An extremely rich American and his daughter innocently marry a pair of lovers who are disposed to continue their intrigue.
The Golden Bowl, Henry James last long novel, is one of the 'three poetic masterpieces' of his later period, as Graham Greene has called them.Walter Allen (author of 'The English Novel') found in it 'a classical perfection never before achieved in English, in which practice and theory are consummately matched.'

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[medard]

It seems to me that your version of The Golden Bowl is not the first printing from 1904 as stated in your Edition Notice at the second page of your epub file. This first version can be found in pynch's Henry James: Complete Works.

Your version seems to be the New York Edition text of The Golden Bowl, with the author's preface from 1909.

It would be kind if you could help me out with this.

[GibbinR]

Perhaps the edition notice is confusing, but I think it is correct.
The actual novel was, I believe, first published in 1904.
This edition is taken from the Gutenberg edition and since that has no information as to its source, I have not made any claim either.
The Gutenberg edition, like so many other Gutenberg editions, has many upper case words (because it started out as a plain text file) which just look wrong to me, so I have 'improved' it by converting the capitalised words into italics, and also adding more italics and the odd diacritic from my Penguin paperback dating from 1966.
(And actually the Gutenberg edition does seem very close to the Penguin which says it was taken from the 1905 first English edition, but I haven't made any detailed comparison, and can't say for sure.)
You are quite right that the Author's Preface is from the 1909 edition, I took that from the Penguin which clearly attributes it.
Hope this makes the situation a little clearer.

[medard]

Thanks a lot for your information. The Edition Notice is missing this. It's a digital version from the first printing 1904, but with the preface of a later version.

[pynch]

This is indeed the 1904/05 version, as can be checked on this website, which lists textual variants between the two editions.

[medard]

Wow. That page has an essay "Beginning to read Henry James – some suggestions".

[GibbinR]

New version of the book uploaded, previous downloads were 96.

This version has now been pretty thoroughly proof-read against two reprints of the 1905 English edition.
The number of changes is not huge (something like 500-1000) and most of these are details of punctuation and spelling which don't really make much difference. However some of the changes are to paragraph boundaries, and quite often these are significant because they implicitly assign a speech to a different speaker. I found that where this happened quite a few puzzling dialogues in the original Gutenberg text became much clearer.

I recommend that anyone who downloaded the previous edition should update with the new version.

[GibbinR]

New edition of the book uploaded, previous downloads were 140.

This edition has some relatively minor layout changes which make it slightly more like the original, and also bring it more into line with the edition of "The Wings of the Dove", also by Henry James, which I have just added.