Henry James' Midnight Song [Paperback]

Carol de Chellis HILL (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Poseidon Press (1993)
• ASIN: B000UZYWIQ
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,330,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An informative and suspensful masterpiece!, June 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Henry James' Midnight Song: A Novel (Paperback)

I wasn't too sure what to expect when I picked up this book at a friend's recommendation. Not having been a Henry James fan, the title simply turned me off. As soon as I'd finished the first two pages, I knew I wasn't going to be able to put this book down without some sort of physical threat to my well-being. Aside from being an exquisitly written novel, it's filled with factual information and characters, social commentary (as applicable to our time as to turn of the century Vienna,) and truely haunting suspense. Plus, it's a bit difficult these days to find a book with truely likeable characters. Hill creates colorful portraits of sometimes bleak historical figures (i.e. Sigmund Freud, Edith Wharton, Carl Jung, and of course Mr. James) with a fabulous array of (possibly) fictional characters that you can't help but feel admiration, adoration, and/or sympathy for. Hill's range of styles and points of view are wonderfully displayed in this fine work that you could read again and again, learning something new everytime.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Secrets of the Fin-de-siecle!, February 11, 2000

By 

Michael Benton (Lexington, KY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Henry James' Midnight Song: A Novel (Paperback)

This is an amazing fictional exploration of a very explosive, talented, and contradictory era and place. That is Vienna, Austria at the turn of the century. Hanging over this whole novel is the question of how a city of beauty and imagination could have also been a hotbed of rampant and violent anti-semitism. But what truly sets this novel apart is its brilliant re-creation of the figures of this age: Henry James as a secret reader of potboilers; Edith Wharton the secret writer of pornography; Carl Jung's indiscretions with female patients; and Sigmund Freud's early failures. The author Hill, is at the top of her game though in inverting the Freudian theories of "female hysteria" and the women characters are strong and appealinq.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing! Very captivating, April 19, 1998

By 

Katherine Schutte - See all my reviews

This review is from: Henry James' Midnight Song: A Novel (Paperback)

This book takes you in and interweaves you inside a complex mystery in which no one will ever really know the truth. Questions our notion of mastery and delivers the unexpected. Read this!