The Sacred Fount: Novel

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One of Henry James's most mesmerizing and unusual novels, The Sacred Fount (1901) has for its scene a weekend party at the great English country house Newmarch. Here James leads the reader down a bizarre garden path. The Sacred Fount--his only novel to employ a first-person narrator--places us in the hands of an obsessive novelist (never named and never described, but perhaps familiar), who detects alarming changes in his acquaintances. A woman known for her élan has lost her poise, a dull man is charming, a friend is suddenly aged, a plain woman sparkles. Where one improves, another seems to suffer. With "plunges of insight, " "as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird, " the narrator stalks his fellow guests through the weekend, avidly trying to make sense of what he comes to believe are actual exchanges of life force. "The sacred fount, " as R.P. Blackmur noted, "is the mystery of the power that passes among us, depleting or restoring us, in friendship, in love, even in more public relations .... [Here] is the beautiful, the critical job of making that mystery manifest.

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