The Beautiful Child - Softcover

"A slender, sly and ingenious tale of the supernatural" --"The Telegraph" "Readers in search of a smart fright...should devour Emma Tennant's cunning, moody and bone-chilling new story inspired by "The Turn of the Screw"" --"The Independent" "Readers in search of a smart fright . . . should devour Emma Tennant's cunning, moody and bone-chilling new story inspired by "The Turn of the Screw," by the shadowy life of Henry James and the nature of fiction itself, as a kind of haunting." "Independent"" "Skin-prickling...a rallying call for the challenging and the difficult that lie behind the cosy terror of a ghost story" "The Herald Scotland""

From Emma Tennant, the acclaimed author of Pemberley and Burnt Diaries, comes an unforgettable tale inspired by Henry James. The Beautiful Child is the last known unfinished story by the great American writer, ending on a Jamesian note of terror in a Christmas idyll, amplified throughout by Tennant's trademark feminist-dreamlike style. A chilling account of cruelty and neglect, Tennant's story suggests a terrifying real scandal behind James's inability to complete his tale of a couple who beseech a fashionable artist to paint the child they never had - none other than the dipsomaniac Mr and Mrs Smith, longstanding servants of James until the novel was abandoned...