One of Henry James's most mesmerizing and unusual novels, The Sacred Fount ( 1901) has for its scene a weekend party at the great English country house Newmarch. Here James leads the reader down a bizarre garden path. The Sacred Fount--his only novel to employ a first-person narrator--places us in the hands of an obsessive novelist ( never named and never described, but perhaps familiar), who detects alarming changes in his acquaintances.
