Child of Fortune (by Guy Bolton) derives from one of the most spacious and complex of all Henry James's novels, The Wings of the Dove. That alone may explain why the most recent of James's stage adaptations—which like the best of them might also have been called The Heiress—is among the most unsatisfactory. It is not so much that Adapter Bolton has violated James's novel (although he has made a host of small changes that reduce the book's great cumulative impact to emotional small change); it is much more that by diminishing James's story to a mere tampered-with story line, by...
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