Henry James was in his late 30s when he published his first uncontested masterpiece, “The Portrait of a Lady” (1880-81), which elevated him from a talented up-and-comer to a major novelist. It is the story of an intelligent, independent young woman named Isabel Archer who is taken from America to England and allowed to make something of herself, but who “affronts” her destiny (as James worded it) by making a bad marriage. When James revised the novel for the collected New York Edition of 1908, he wrote a preface to account for its origins and aims, concluding after a dozen pages with the admission, “There is really too much to say.”
That’s where Michael Gorra steps in with “Portrait of a Novel,” devoting more than 300 intelligent pages to everything James left unsaid about this superb, game-changing book.
(Liveright) - ”Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece” by Michael Gorra.
Mixing literary criticism with biography and travelogue, Gorra — an English professor at Smith College — provides a fascinating “making of” documentary like those that accompany some films these days. Literally following in James’s footsteps — Gorra visited the places in Italy and England where James composed the novel — he alternates between close readings of the novel itself and wide-ranging background material drawn from James’s life and writings. To some extent, he imitates the form of James’s novel, which moves crab-wise both forward and sideways as James frequently interrupts the linear story line to backtrack or leap forward over events (such as the first few years of Isabel’s marriage) or to bring it to a halt for a dozen pages while Isabel simply thinks. Gorra even weaves unattributed quotations from James’s writings into his own exquisite prose, giving his “Portrait” the same varnished finish as James’s “Portrait.”
Gorra demonstrates that James was interested less in plot than in character, and specifically in consciousness. “The novel isn’t finally about a young woman’s choice of a husband, or even about Americans in Europe,” Gorra writes. “It is instead a drama of the perceiving mind.” James hoped this sort of intellectual drama would be as “interesting,” he wrote in his 1908 preface, “as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate,” the stuff of commercial fiction. Gorra underlines how radically James broke from the fiction practices of the 19th century in this novel. Not only did he shift the emphasis from plot to character, but he introduced into fiction one of the earliest examples of “stream of consciousness” (his older brother William’s phrase), and he dared to leave his ending unresolved, to the frustration of many readers.
James was one of the first purveyors of what is now maligned as “difficult” fiction, especially in his later novels when he stopped writing to please his audience. “He writes now as if he wants only to please himself,” Gorra remarks of this final phase, “and to the degree that he’s concerned with his readers at all, it’s to pay the fit and the few the compliment of assuming that they’ll be able to follow.”
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