wife. After previously regarding Maggie as a naïve, immature American, the Prince seems impressed by his wife's delicate diplomacy. The novel ends with Adam and Charlotte Verver about to depart for the United States. Amerigo says he can "see nothing but" Maggie and embraces her. Main characters Maggie Verver Prince Amerigo Charlotte Stant Adam Verver Fanny Assingham Colonel Robert Assingham Literary significance and criticism The Golden Bowl's intense focus on its four main characters gives the novel both its tremendous power and its peculiar feeling of claustrophobia. 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." Critics consign The Golden Bowl to James's "Old Pretender" phase of writing, which characterises his final novels. Although the narrative is very focused compared to his earlier works, with minimal characters, the writing is complex and elaborate. 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..." 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." Author Colm Toibin called The Golden Bowl Henry James's best work, in part because James "stripped down" the number of characters to four. He describes James's style of expressing consciousness as "a system of clauses, sub-clauses, modifications, qualifications and in some cases ruminations", which anticipates the later styles of stream of consciousness writing by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. John Banville also compared James's modernist stream of consciousness technique, which characterises The Golden Bowl, to James Joyce, summarising it as "a style designed to catch, with immense, with fiendish, subtlety, and in sentences of labyrinthine intricacy, the very texture of conscious life." The author Rebecca West, on the other hand, said of it that "winter had fallen on [James'] genius in The Golden Bowl." Critics have noted the overbearing symbolism of the golden bowl, which