The Beautiful Child — Emma Tennant

From the acclaimed author of Pemberley and Thornfield Hall comes a 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 and amplified throughout by Tennant's trademark feminist-dreamlike style. A chilling account of cruelty and neglect, it suggests a terrifying real scandal behind James's inability to complete his story 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.