Before You Begin

Before you begin.

On a breezy cliff at Folkestone a painter is struck dumb by a face. Its owner is Flora Saunt, an orphan of twenty whose beauty stops strangers in shop doorways and railway carriages, and whose single conviction is that her face is all she has and all she will ever need. There is only one flaw in this radiant creature, and it is the one thing she will deny to her last breath: her eyes are failing, and the spectacles that could save her sight would, she believes, destroy the one gift that makes her worth looking at.

Henry James — the great novelist of consciousness and concealment — turns this small, cruel predicament into a subtle, ironic drama of vanity, love, and sight. Around Flora move a shrewd goggled friend who tells her the plain truth, a cold viscount who wants only her beauty, and a plain, awkward man who loves her without hope and without end.

Published in 1896, Glasses is James in miniature: a story that watches, with pity and irony, what a person will sacrifice to be looked at — and asks who, in the end, truly sees us. Its strange, gentle close has surprised readers for over a century.

This illustrated edition gathers the tale into six visual movements — recap plates you unlock as you read, each drawing together the cast, the places, and the turns of the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page and step onto the Folkestone cliffs, where a beautiful young woman would rather not see than not be seen.