The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
His cousin, who died in 1870, also held his imagination. She had adored the work of George Eliot. She harbored, she wrote to John Gray, ‘‘an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot.’’ She wrote to Henry James as she lay ill: ‘‘Have you seen Mrs. Lewes [George Eliot] yet? Kiss her for me— But, from all accounts, I don’t believe that is exactly what one wish[es] to do to her.’’ Now that Minny Temple was dead, James could conjure her up in his fiction without having to worry about her response. In ‘‘Traveling Companions,’’ a story written soon after her death, he could imagine her in Italy, a country she had longed to visit. He could place her there once more in Daisy Miller. Now he also sought to write an ambitious novel about her. ‘‘I had [Minny Temple] in mind,’’ he wrote to a friend as he worked on the novel, ‘‘and there is in the heroine a considerable infusion of my impression of her remarkable nature.’’ But in imagining her as the central focus of a novel, in a large and well-proportioned house of fiction, he had to solve an interesting problem, which he formulated first in a letter to his brother after her death. In life, he could not imagine her married, so free and original was her spirit. His portrait now could complete her, solve the puzzle of her. He wrote to the same friend who believed it was a direct portrait: ‘‘Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished. In truth everyone, in life, is incomplete, and it is [in] the work of art that in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify them, as it were.’’
In finding a way to complete her, and to write the second half of his novel, offering his portrait a plot, he allowed his imagination to be nourished by two outside forces—one, a book, the other, an apartment. The book was George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; the apartment belonged to his friend Francis Boott, who lived with his daughter, Lizzie, above Florence in Bellosguardo.
Henry James wrote his first piece about Daniel Deronda in February 1876 when the first installment had appeared. At the end of that year, when the novel was published, he wrote an extraordinary second piece for The Atlantic Monthly. It consisted of a long, invented conversation among three people who had read the book. It made clear that James had, once more, problems with the form of the book and with many of its characters. But he allowed one of his characters this observation of Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine: ‘‘Gwendolen is a masterpiece. She is known, felt and presented, psychologically, in the grand manner’’; her husband, Grandcourt, was ‘‘a consummate picture of English brutality.’’
So James had in front of him for his contemplation a novel that he viewed, as did his brother William, a failure, but whose central image of marital tyranny, pursued with such skill and brilliance by Eliot, could offer him an idea for his own novel. The drama surrounding the marriage of a passionate woman to a bully had appeared in other novels too, such as Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1867), in which Lady Laura confessed to an unmarried man her deep unhappiness and sense of entrapment in marriage, much as Gwendolen did to Daniel Deronda, much as Isabel finally did to Ralph Touchett. James had merely to set about refining the passion, the bullying, the entrapment, the unhappiness, the confession, but he did not dilute them; instead, by playing a game between what was unspoken and what was unspeakable, he made his drama more powerful.
Francis Boott, whom James had known in Boston, had reared his daughter, Lizzie, in Italy ‘‘as if she were a hot-house flower,’’ as Leon Edel has written. As he worked on his novel in Florence, James visited them very often in their apartment on Bellosguardo overlooking the city, using their relationship as bedrock for the relationship between Gilbert Osmond and his daughter, Pansy, and placing his fictional characters in the very rooms in which his friends lived, much as he had placed Isabel at the opening of the book in his (and Minny’s) grandmother’s house in Albany.
During the same period, he saw a great deal as well of the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had come with a letter of introduction to him. As Leon Edel has written: ‘‘He turned on the full power of his charm for Miss Woolson.’’ She was to become one of his best friends, but as he worked on the book, it was enough for him that she was intelligent, deeply receptive to the sights of the city and utterly American. Like most novelists, he used whatever came his way to deepen the texture of his novel. Osmond and Isabel would walk together in the places in Florence where he and Constance walked. When the book appeared Constance wrote to him: ‘‘With no character of yours have I ever felt myself so much in sympathy. . . . I found myself judging her and thinking of her with perfect . . . comprehension, and a complete acquaintance as it were; everything she did and said I judged from a personal standpoint. . . . I always knew exactly all about Isabel.’’
James used everything he knew, including his own complex self, when he wrote The Portrait of a Lady. He dramatized his own interest in freedom against his own egotism, his own bright charm against the darker areas of his imagination. He also used the ghost of his cousin; he conjured up real houses; he described the cities of Rome and Florence, which he had come to know and love; he weaved in English manners, which he had, by the time he wrote the book, come to appreciate; and he allowed the books he had been reading, especially the novels of George Eliot, which placed a deeply intelligent and passionate woman at the center, to encourage him to make his young woman even more deeply intelligent and even more subtly passionate. He was fearless in his depiction of the play of her consciousness; her high ideals and her need for freedom were dramatized against repression and dark restriction. In concentrating on her fate in the world, he created one of the most magnificent figures in the large and sprawling house of fiction.
—Colm Tóibín
Selected Bibliography
WORKS BY HENRY JAMES
A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, 1875 Tales
Transatlantic Sketches, 1875 Travel
Roderick Hudson, 1875 Novel
The American, 1877 Novel
French Poets and Novelists, 1878 Criticism
The Europeans, 1878 Novel
Daisy Miller, 1878 Tale
Hawthorne, 1879 Criticism
Washington Square, 1880 Tale
The Portrait of a Lady, 1881 Novel
The Art of Fiction, 1884 Criticism
The Bostonians, 1886 Novel
The Princess Casamassima, 1886 Novel
Partial Portraits, 1888 Criticism
The Aspern Papers, 1888 Tale
The Tragic Muse, 1889 Novel
The Lesson of the Master and Other Stories, 1892 Tales
Embarrassments, 1896 Tales
The Spoils of Poynton, 1897 Novel
What Maisie Knew, 1897 Novel
The Two Magics, 1898 Tales
The Awkward Age, 1899 Novel
The Sacred Fount, 1901 Novel
The Wings of the Dove, 1902 Novel
The Ambassadors, 1903 Novel
The Golden Bowl, 1904 Novel
The American Scene, 1907 Travel
The Finer Grain, 1910 Tales
A Small Boy and Others, 1913 Autobiography
Notes of a Son and Brother, 1914 Autobiography
Notes on Novelists, 1914 Criticism
The Middle Years, 1917 Unfinished Autobiography
The Art of the Novel, 1934 Critical Prefaces
The Notebooks of Henry James, 1947 Memoranda
SELECTED BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Bell, Millicent. Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Berkeley, Elizabeth M. and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, eds. William and Henry James: Selected Letters. Charlottes- ville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry James (Bloom’s Major Novelists). Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.
Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Ed
——, ed. Henry James: Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: European Writers and Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America, 1984.
Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Holly, Carol. Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Kress, Jill M. The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton. London: Routledge, 2002.
McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Moore, Harry T. Henry James. New York: Viking Books, 1974.
Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Tambling, Jeremy. Henry James (Critical Issues). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Taylor, Andrew. Henry James and the Father Question. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Tintner, Adeline R. Henry James’s Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
——. The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work After 1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
A Note on the Text
The Signet Classics text of The Portrait of a Lady is reprinted from the first edition, which was published by Macmillan and Co., London, November 4, 1881. Spelling has been brought into conformity with modern British usage.
The first American edition was published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, November 16, 1881. The Portrait was serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine from October 1880 to October 1881, inclusive, and in the Atlantic Monthly from November 1880 to December 1881, inclusive.
1 James later revised this passage to end: ‘‘But though she was lost in admiration of her opportunity she managed to move back into the deepest shade of it, even as some wild, caught creature in a vast cage. This ‘splendid’ security so offered her was not the greatest she could conceive.’’
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
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