Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Telemaco Signorini, Giuseppe De Nittis and Giovanni Fattori. A literary scholar takes rooms in a decaying Venetian palazzo under a false name, because the old woman upstairs was once a great poet's lover and still has his letters. James got the idea from a real hunt for Shelley's papers, and wrote the sharpest thing anyone has written about the biographer's trade: everything the narrator does is reasonable, and all of it is theft. Sixty plates by Whistler and Turner trace the water, gardens and old stone of the Venetian world the narrator schemes in, from 1629 to 1919.
