Lord Beaupre

Lord John Beaupre is young, handsome, agreeable, and disgustingly rich. In other words, he is the most dangerous catch in England. Mothers shadow him to dinner parties. Debutantes materialize at every country house. His own cousins circle with matrimonial intent. When an American heiress arrives on the scene, she sees the absurdity of it all with fresh eyes that even the English lack. Henry James deploys his trademark precision to dissect the marriage market as a kind of warfare, where pleasantries conceal desperate calculations and a man's very virtues become his vulnerability. This is James at his most sparkling and comic, before the psychological intensity of his later masterpieces, skewering a society where love is the one thing that never enters the transaction.