Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some critics have called the "major phase" of James's career.

While there, he re-encounters Charlotte Stant, another young American and a former mistress from his days in Rome; they had met in Mrs. Assingham's drawing room.

Also concealing her knowledge from Charlotte and denying any change to their friendship, she gradually persuades her father to return to America with his wife.

The Golden Bowl's intense focus on its four main characters gives the novel both its tremendous power and its peculiar feeling of claustrophobia.

[1] Henry James himself had a high regard for his last work, describing it to his American publisher as "distinctly the most done of my productions ― the most composed and constructed and completed...I hold the thing the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions.

Gore Vidal attributed this verbosity in part to James's habit at the time of dictating his novels to stenographers rather than typing the manuscript himself.

Vidal thought the style of The Golden Bowl, as well as The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903), mimicked James's own rhetorical manner, which was "endlessly complex, humorous, unexpected - euphemistic where most people are direct and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual..."[5] Robert McCrum included the novel in The Guardian's list of 100 Best Novels, describing it as an "amazing, labyrinthine, terrifying and often claustrophobic narrative.

[citation needed] Critics have noted the overbearing symbolism of the golden bowl, which is eventually broken in a scene that may not be fully effective.

In 1972, the BBC produced a six-hour televised version that was highly praised,[8] with a screenplay by Jack Pulman, Gayle Hunnicutt as Charlotte, Barry Morse as Adam Verver, Jill Townsend as Maggie, Daniel Massey as the Prince, and Cyril Cusack as Bob Assingham, ingeniously presented as the narrator, commenting on the development of the story very much in the style of Henry James.