The Princess Casamassima

Hyacinth Robinson is an orphan raised by a spinster dressmaker. As a young man, he gets caught up in radical politics and a terrorist plot. He inadvertently meets the title character, who is a revolutionary herself, and who introduces Hyacinth to a world of refinement and privilege. Eventually, he begins to rethink his role in the movement, and his conundrum forces him to act with fatal consequences.   

Henry James (1843-1916) was born in America but after forty years in England became a British subject in 1915.  A consummate prose stylist and innovator, possessed of acute psychological discernment, James took the art of the novel to rarefied heights in such masterworks as The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl, helping to pioneer literary realism.