Perhaps there is a flaw in the next novel, The Golden Bowl, a novel about a flaw in a work of art. Once again a man shifts from one woman to another, and moral and psychological significance is imputed to the move. Books rewrite their successors, and The Golden Bowl revises the triangle of Milly, Kate, and Densher, turning its power-and-love story into a four-sided shape. Amerigo, the prince, is won by his wife, Maggie, from his mistress, Charlotte, and the victory involves much condemnation of Charlotte and some condemnation of the man. There is a strong moral sense in the novel which emanates as explicit utterance from Maggie herself, though also from implications of the action. In The Appropriate Form I argued that, like The Ambassadors, this novel showed a protrusion of the structural sense within the characters. James might wish us to see Strether gain nothing from his successful and unsuccessful embassy, but it is hard to take the renunciation of a relationship we never feel as an object of his desire. Readers of The Golden Bowl may conclude that Charlotte helps to make the union of Maggie and Amerigo, but Maggie's gracious sentence ‘It is as if we had needed her … to build us up’ (bk. VI, ch. 2) would come more sensitively from the narrator – or Fanny Assingham, since James's narrator does not draw such conclusions. At times the characters show the strain of their narrator's reticence.

Maggie's is a moral tit-for-tat, like Milly's bequest, which ensures posthumous victory over Kate. But Milly dies, which makes her victory less smug. Novels often revise romantic cliché. Wuthering Heights is about love being ‘too big’ to resist, The Wings of the Dove about being in love with a memory, The Golden Bowl about wives and husbands who don't understand each other. When the wife who doesn't understand comes into her under-standing and her marriage, we don't rejoice – or, if we do, we don't simply rejoice – at the victory for marriage but at the victory for a liberating imagination. Maggie puts herself in Charlotte's position, that of the powerful manipulating the less powerful, acting on behalf of the people she loves most, as we all do, except saints.