Introduction

Criticism has long recognized that, in its amplitude of conception and fineness of execution, The Portrait of a Lady marks a decisive turning-point in the history of Henry James’s early career. In this novel many of the themes and motifs that had slowly evolved in the authors previous work resurface with particular intensity: the probing contrast of trans-Atlantic manners and mores (evident at least as early as “A Passionate Pilgrim” [1871]), the distinctive moral spontaneity of the American heroine (more notoriously embodied in the eponymous “Daisy Miller” [1878]), the deliberate concentration of psychological interest in the novel’s central consciousness (first attempted, manifestly, in Roderick Hudson [1875]). If, as Emerson famously said of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as published in 1855, the work must have had a long foreground somewhere, [1] the foreground of The Portrait of a Lady can be discerned, at least in part, in many of James’s earlier (and less celebrated) experiments in fiction.

There is a range of more specific rehearsals revisited by James and significantly embellished or elaborated when he composed The Portrait of a Lady. Bessie Alden’s rebuff of Lord Lambeth in “An International Episode” (1878) prepares us for Isabel’s refusal of Lord Warburton. In “Longstaff’s Marriage” (1878), Diana Belfield’s rather stiffly ingrained chastity prompts her to spurn several offers of marriage (she is “passionately single, fiercely virginal”: “it was not her suitors in themselves that she contemned; it was simply the idea of marrying”) until at last she relents —in Rome; Isabel, too, feels it is “vulgar” to dwell excessively on the subject of possible husbands, and the same pattern of deferred courtship is repeated in the later novel. [2]
Matters which eventually surface in Portrait—concealed illegitimacy and vengeful maternity —drive the plot of Roderick Hudson (1875), which also takes place largely among Americans in Italy. Claire de Cintré’s capitulation to family authority and retreat to the convent frustrate Christopher Newman’s marital designs in The American (1877), foreshadowing Rosier’s defeat in an important sub-plot of the later work, when Osmond obliges Pansy to resume her parochial confinement with the Catholic sisterhood. [3] The novel’s important antecedents, of course, go further back and range beyond James’s own oeuvre, bringing home the extent to which this highly ambitious American author wanted to establish himself as a worthy successor to Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. On almost any page of James’s early masterpiece, we can find traces that confirm the book’s claims to such a distinguished literary lineage —particularly at moments when the narrative voice achieves its fullest assurance in the depiction of character. With its incisive wit and saturated knowingness about English life, for instance, this brief expository passage (in Chapter III) about Isabel Archer’s “crazy Aunt Lydia” (Mrs. Touchett) might easily remind us of Emma or, despite the broadness of its satire, even of Middlemarch:

Mrs. Touchett indulged in no regrets nor speculations, and usually came once a year to spend a month with her husband, a period during which she apparently took pains to convince him that she had adopted the right system. She was not fond of England, and had three or four reasons for it to which she currently alluded; they bore upon minor points of British civilisation, but for Mrs. Touchett they amply justified nonresidence. She detested breadsauce, which, as she said, looked like a poultice and tasted like soap; she objected to the consumption of beer by her maidservants; and she affirmed that the British laundress (Mrs. Touchett was very particular about the appearance of her linen) was not a mistress of her art.

Likewise, the novel’s endearingly fussy opening paragraph —where every parenthetical aside testifies to the solid convictions of social class —launched a novel of social observation that struck many readers, including James’s friend, editor and fellow-novelist William Dean Howells, as at least the equal of anything in Thackeray; while from Dickens James learned among other things the comedic economy of Anglo-Saxon naming: Stackpole, Goodwood, Bantling, the sisters Climber—all of them ticklish enough to make the reader smile.

James’s debts, of course, are not merely English. Like the lengthening shadows that begin to inch across the splendid turf at Gardencourt as the novel opens, the pervading spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne also makes itself felt in those first paragraphs, in which suggestions of nature’s mutability (and even the sad portent of impending death) delicately register. James’s poetic phrasing, describing “the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon” —

Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality.

—might remind us of Hawthorne’s language in the prefatory sketch to Mosses from an Old Manse (1846): “In the stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of perfect ripeness.” [4] Despite James’s strenuous effort to distance himself, artistically, from his American predecessor in the biography he had recently completed for Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series ( Hawthorne [1879]), the novel he wrote soon afterwards belies such alienating claims. Surely Richard Brodhead is right to assert that “in The Portrait of a Lady, Hawthorne is not left behind, but rather incorporated into the deepest recesses of James’s imagination.” As Brodhead goes on to suggest, during the re-reading of Hawthorne’s works in preparation for writing the biography, “some part of James was recognizing and assimilating what his critical perception blocked out.” [5] And as T. S. Eliot recognized long ago, when the biographer wrote that “the fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it,” James affirmed his essential kinship with the American romancer whose provincial limitations he simultaneously disdained. [6]

Mapping out the significant patterns of continuity between these two writers has preoccupied many important critical projects —beginning at least with William Dean Howells’s contemporaneous (1882) affirmation of James’s modernity, in which he asserted that the art of fiction as his friend was practicing it derived from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than from Dickens and Thackeray, whose garrulously intrusive narrative methods already seemed shop-worn and outdated. [7] In American Renaissance (1941), F. O. Matthiessen took his cue from T. S. Eliot’s concise, but pregnant, account of the “Hawthorne aspect” in James, to trace a legible line of influence beginning with Hawthorne, continuing through James, and culminating in Eliot himself. Trying to resuscitate James’s essential Americanism after three decades of criticism that typically had bemoaned the author’s supposedly enervating deracination, Matthiessen’s account has been corroborated and extended by many others since. [8] Other important books that explore intertextual relationships between Hawthorne and James are Marius Bewley’s The Complex Fate (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952); R. W. B. Lewis’s Trials of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965); Peter Buitenhuis’s The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); and Robert Emmet Long’s The Great Succession: Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979).

At least with respect to The Portrait of a Lady, Hawthorne’s influence arguably becomes more pronounced after James transports his characters to Italy (territory, for an American novelist, much shaded by The Marble Faun [1860]), where native innocence is overshadowed and all but overwhelmed by the darkling reaches of unrecorded crimes. James takes pains to remind us that Isabel is not a daughter of the Puritans, yet she has more in common with Hawthorne’s Hilda than we might at first suspect. When (at the close of Chapter XXXV) the Countess Gemini threatens to sully Isabel’s ears with sordid bits of family scandal, she first wonders whether it might not be better for her young niece to go out of the room: “‘Let her stay, please,’” is all the older American woman can answer, taking refuge in the jeune fille’s continued presence: “‘I would rather hear nothing that Pansy may not!’” After her marriage to Osmond, cultivating that kind of willful innocence becomes a (misplaced) line of defense for Isabel. No wonder her long-since-disabused sister-in-law will be forced to exclaim (in Chapter LI), “‘I never saw a woman with such a pure mind!’” —which, under the circumstances, is hardly meant to be a compliment.

Charting the Adamic fall from innocence was one of Hawthorne’s most resonant themes, one to which James also was powerfully drawn. In The Portrait of a Lady, the sober closing cadences of Paradise Lost tinge the reader’s understanding of Isabel’s fateful choices (as in Chapter XXXI: “The world lay before her —she could do whatever she chose”), much as they had for many of Hawthorne’s characters before her. [9] When we hear echoes of Milton again in the final chapter, as Goodwood tempts Isabel to forsake the claims of marriage and redeem her future with him (“‘We can do absolutely as we please . . . The world is all before us —and the world is very large’”), we can also recognize that James is strategically transposing the climactic forest scene in The Scarlet Letter, letting the desperate American suitor appropriate Hester Prynne’s ardent appeal for release and escape. “‘Is the world then so narrow?’” Hawthorne’s heroine plaintively asks Dimmesdale; “‘Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life?’” [10] Goodwood expresses a parallel question to Isabel in less archaic language, but its import is much the same: “‘Why should you go back,’” he demands, “‘ —why should you go through that ghastly form?’” And, just as Dimmesdale knows that flight is not the answer (he returns from the forest to mount the scaffold and make his sorrowful confession to his assembled congregation), Isabel rejects her easy ticket to freedom: “she had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.”

Besides his recent (re)immersion in Hawthorne (antecedent to composing the critical biography), James also had been carefully weighing the considerable achievements of George Eliot, whose late great novels ( Middlemarch [1871-72] and Daniel Deronda [1876]) provided him occasion for important critical response. It seems appropriate to read his 1873 review of Middlemarch, in particular, as an eager anticipation of the formal challenge awaiting him in The Portrait of a Lady.
[11] James already had complained about the structural deficiencies of Eliot’s novels (in 1866 he described Felix Holt as “an admirable tissue of details; but . . . quite without character as a composition” [ LC1 926]), and in this respect Middlemarch was no better: the book struck him as “a treasure-house of details but an indifferent whole” ( LC1 958). Privately, James was more generous. To Grace Norton (1834-1926) he admitted that the book “with all its faults, is . . . a truly immense performance. My brother W m lately wrote me that he was ‘aghast at its intellectual power.’ This is strong —& what one says of Shakespeare. But certainly a marvellous mind throbs in every page of Middlemarch.” [12] The published review expressed particular concern about Eliot’s seeming neglect of the novel’s intended subject. “An ardent young girl was to have been the central figure,” he pointed out, “a young girl framed for a larger moral life than circumstance often affords, yearning for a motive for sustained spiritual effort and only wasting her ardor and soiling her wings against the meanness of opportunity” ( LC1 959). But in the multitudinous sprawl of the novel’s social reach, the psychological drama of Dorothea Brooke’s abortive career was crowded out by less compelling characters and more commonplace situations. “Dorothea was altogether too superb a heroine to be wasted,” James lamented, “yet she plays a narrower part than the imagination of the reader demands. She is of more consequence than the action of which she is the nominal centre” ( LC1 960). In creating Isabel Archer, James was attempting to remedy the marginalizing of Eliot’s heroine by devising a narrative structure that would keep her ordeal of consciousness always in focus, giving substance to the kind of ‘centre’ to which Middlemarch had done inadequate justice.

James’s later commentary on Daniel Deronda has invited some to see that novel as the primary inspiration for The Portrait of a Lady. F. R. Leavis was one of the first to insist upon distinct parallels between James and George Eliot, claiming in The Great Tradition that Isabel’s disastrous marriage to Gilbert Osmond was modeled on the ill-fated pairing of Gwendolen Harleth and Henleigh Grandcourt. “Isabel Archer is Gwendolen Harleth seen by a man,” Leavis insisted; “Osmond so plainly is Grandcourt, hardly disguised, that the general derivative relation of James’s novel to George Eliot’s becomes quite unquestionable.” [13] Certain passages from James’s somewhat stagey “conversation” about Eliot’s novel (published in the Atlantic in 1876, and reprinted by Leavis as an appendix to The Great Tradition) [14] offer suggestive hints, especially when James allows his imaginary interlocutors to digress on Gwendolen Harleth’s nature and social fate. “Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness,” her advocate (Theodora) applauds,

—its eagerness, its presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and silliness, its sense of its own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent and clever, and therefore tragedy can have a hold upon her. Her conscience doesn’t make the tragedy; that is an old story and, I think, a secondary form of suffering. It is the tragedy that makes her conscience, which then reacts upon it; and I can think of nothing more powerful than the way in which the growth of her conscience is traced, nothing more touching than the picture of its helpless maturity. ( LC1 989-90)

It is left to James’s presumptive stand-in (Constantius) to affirm the novel’s irreducible solidity. “Gwendolen is a masterpiece,” he exclaims (anticipating the language that James would employ in a later letter to Howells projecting the subject of Portrait): “She is known, felt and presented, psychologically, altogether in the grand manner” ( LC1 979). “You may point out two or three weak spots in detail,” Constantius admits, but

the fact remains that Gwendolen’s whole history is vividly told. And see how the girl is known, inside out, how thoroughly she is felt and understood. It is the most intelligent thing in all George Eliot’s writing, and that is saying much. It is so deep, so true, so complete, it holds such a wealth of psychological detail, it is more than masterly. ( LC1 988-89)

These were high claims indeed, and in Eliot’s novels James found a richness of psychological insight that he wanted not simply to match but to exceed. Just two months after “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation” appeared, he intimated to Howells that he was already thinking of the subject for his next major work, a novel that would be “the portrait of the character & recital of the adventures of a woman —a great swell, psychologically; a grande nature
—accompanied by many ‘developments’” ( LFL 125).

His way of achieving these ambitions has sometimes led later criticism astray. It has been suggested, for example, that in contrast to Middlemarch, where Dorothea’s story is seen against a larger social backdrop, “Isabel’s story is purely hers. By his technique, James concentrates on his heroine’s life and almost entirely ignores the larger social and historical world in which his characters presumably live.” [15] Closer consideration of the texture of James’s novel obliges us to re-examine this commonly-held assumption. Superficially, of course, The Portrait of a Lady slights some of its opportunities for engaging pressing social or political issues. By way of example, many of Henrietta Stackpole’s fiercely democratic pronunciamientos are so exaggerated they cannot be taken altogether seriously. Acknowledging this element of satire, Maxwell Geismar acidulously noted that “the only valid social criticism, or social commentary, in The Portrait of a Lady is in the portrait of Henrietta Stackpole, the brassy American lady journalist who snoops around the British aristocracy for the benefit of the democratic ‘free press.’ She is an amusing caricature at times,” Geismar concedes, but still a comparatively weak vehicle for criticizing “the yellow journalism of the period.” [16] As for the British aristocracy, James himself admitted that calling attention to Lord Warburton’s alleged radicalism was either a mistake or a superfluous occasion for social commentary. After Howells had expressed his admiration for the character of Warburton, James confided his regret that the British peer was “after all but a secondary figure” —but not for political reasons. “I have made rather too much of his radicalism in the beginning —there is no particular use for it later” (5 Dec. [1880], LFL 157). Nonetheless, especially as the novel maps out the cultural geography of expatriated Americans in Europe, political connotations, even when comically traced, significantly inform James’s viewpoint.

“‘I sometimes think we have got into a rather bad way, living off here among things and people not our own,’” Osmond says to Isabel (in Chapter XXIV), “‘without responsibilities or attachments, with nothing to hold us together or keep us up; marrying foreigners, forming artificial tastes, playing tricks with our natural mission.’” His remark, of course, is intended to engender the young woman’s sympathy toward him and to encourage in her the redemptive impulse she will so eagerly cling to as a kind of sublime justification for her misguided engagement. But, small as it is, Osmond’s remark is itself a kind of reverberation, an echo of a sentiment James had expressed almost as soon as he began transplanting his fictional characters from America to Europe. As a still somewhat perplexed Winterbourne muses in “Daisy Miller” (1878), “He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone” ( CS 2: 246). At the tale’s conclusion, Winterbourne repeats his recriminating confession: “I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts” ( CS 2: 295). In many of these characters, prolonged expatriation invites a kind of ossifying conservatism which, when taken to extremes, becomes even contemptuous of more liberal American values.

Mrs. Touchett’s reproachful attitude toward her sister’s orphaned offspring gives us early warning of this prospect; and others of her European acquaintance confirm it, especially when Aunt Lydia escorts Isabel to Paris where they spend several weeks among the American colony long resident there. “There was nothing like Paris,” as Mr. Luce, one of Mrs. Touchett’s circle, blandly affirms in Chapter XX; “but it must be confessed,” the narrator continues,

that Mr. Luce thought less highly of the French capital than in earlier days. In the list of his occupations his political reveries should not be omitted, for they were doubtless the animating principle of many hours that superficially seemed vacant. Like many of his fellow colonists, Mr. Luce was a high —or rather a deep —conservative, and gave no countenance to the government recently established in France. He had no faith in its duration, and would assure you from year to year that its end was close at hand. “They want to be kept down, sir, to be kept down; nothing but the strong hand —the iron heel —will do for them,” he would frequently say of the French people; and his ideal of a fine government was that of the lately-abolished Empire. “Paris is much less attractive than in the days of the Emperor; he knew how to make a city pleasant,” Mr. Luce had often remarked to Mrs. Touchett, who was quite of his own way of thinking, and wished to know what one had crossed that odious Atlantic for but to get away from republics.

This way of thinking had made its impression on James during his stint as Parisian correspondent for the New York Tribune, when he would pepper his columns with observations about French politics, usually at the expense of conservatives and reactionaries, who resisted legislative efforts to put the Third Republic on a solid constitutional foundation. A frequent target of the American’s satire was Louis Joseph Buffet (1818-98), then serving as Minister of the Interior, whom James chided for

goading a thoroughly well-disposed and well-conducted country to desperation. His theory is that however well-conducted France may be, she is so only by compulsion and so long as she feels the strong hand . . . All his talk is of “social peril,” but no one can in the least imagine what he means. [17]

No one of James’s way of thinking, perhaps; but Mr. Luce can —though his prejudices lead to no strenuous activity. Besides going daily to offices of an American bank to collect his mail, he occasionally sits for an hour in a chair on the Champs Elysées and dines “with a friend or two at the Café Anglais,” where his talent for ordering dinner is “a source of felicity to his companions.” These are his only known “avocations,” James writes, “but they had beguiled his hours for upwards of half a century.” The author was drawing upon grim memories of his own year in Paris (1875-6), when the dull routine of the American colony depressed him utterly: “My flimsy compatriots are back,” he then wrote to his brother William, “& the idea of beginning again to play at society with them is intolerable.” [18]

False sophistication for these deracinated Americans quickly shades off into snobbery and self-conscious assertion of class prerogative, as so many other tales by this author attest. A representative example is “The Pension Beaurepas” (1879), in which a young American girl (Aurora Church) wants nothing so much as to return to the United States (if only to live in Thirty-Seventh Street!); but her long-Europeanized mother (to whom Americans seem very crude) prefers their life abroad and seeks to arrange a suitable marriage for her daughter. “‘We like the old, trodden paths,’” she says; “‘we like the old, old world’” ( CS 2: 425). In this she anticipates Madame Merle’s declaration to Isabel in Chapter XIX, “‘I belong to the old world’” (an echo which, in the New York Edition, becomes even more exact, as she there intones: “‘I belong to the old, old world’”).

It should also be noted that, incidental figure though he is, Luce ominously prefigures Gilbert Osmond in striking ways. Osmond’s physical resemblance to Mr. Luce is quite telling: “He was a man of forty,” we learn of Osmond in Chapter XXII, “with a well-shaped head, upon which the hair, still dense, but prematurely grizzled, had been cropped close.” “He was the most unoccupied man in Europe,” this Mr. Luce, “a tall, lean, grizzled, well-brushed gentleman” with rigid habits and a nostalgic fixation on the vanished pomp of the late Second Empire. “‘What do you see now?’” he superciliously complains; “‘It’s no use talking, the styles all gone.’” Osmond’s standard of comparison, of course, proves to be even more invidious. On the preposterous short list of people he claims to have envied —the Emperor of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, and the Pope of Rome —Napoleon III does not even figure. Presumably, Napoleon I might have, as later (in Chapter XXXVII) we see ensconced in the Osmonds’ Roman sitting-room a “big cold Empire clock,” “an immense classic structure,” together with a collection of other furniture from that period —all of it acquired to reflect Osmond’s tasteful prowess.

In The Portrait of a Lady, as elsewhere, the sharpness of James’s political critique gets much of its edge from concomitant aesthetic questions and issues. A confirmed —or at least professed —dread of vulgarity is the controlling principle of Jamesian conservatism, which also helps to explain why the author’s political leanings have so long been misunderstood. Not long after moving to London in the winter of 1876, James was befriended by an important network of Liberal journalists, editors, and politicians (and their social backers), whose combined support and patronage gave the writer the kind of secure professional foothold that had eluded him in Paris (and also the United States). These influential contacts also accelerated James’s nomination for membership in the illustrious Reform Club, which quickly became for him an indispensable convenience and social resource. [19] In most accounts of the author’s life, the political implications of James’s fabled “conquest of London” have been eclipsed by its more purely social dimension (his dining out, legendarily, 107 times in one season, for example); [20] but fuller examination of the writer’s correspondence helps correct this imbalance. “A ‘middle-class’ snobbish underbred British Tory is about as low a form of life as there is,” James wrote to his mother (26 Aug. [1877]), “& the name of such people is legion. Sometimes the thought of them spoils all England for me —which is a great pity.” [21] If anything saved all England for James, it was (at least in part) the companionship of more forward-looking public men, whose liberal traits the author affectionately valorizes in the figure of Lord Warburton. When Isabel is surprised by Warburton’s unexpected appearance in the Roman Forum (in Chapter XXVII), the narrator’s admiring gaze operates in tandem with hers, as she takes in this “fine specimen” of “a highly-developed Englishman”: “with his clear grey eye, his bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its brownness, his manly figure, his modest manner, and his general air of being a gentleman . . . he was such a representative of the British race as need not in any clime have been disavowed by those who have a kindness for it.”

While many of the characters in James’s novel instinctively shrink from the democratic commonplace (what Mrs. Touchett derisively terms “boarding-house civilisation”), Gilbert Osmond epitomizes the rarefied aesthetic that secretly engenders —and empowers —such a condescending attitude. But we need to recognize, as Jonathan Freedman has reminded us, that “the representation of Osmond is thoroughly grounded in a particular historical moment —the moment when “the aesthetic craze” in England “was at its height” —and that James’s novel “inscribes a historically specific response to aestheticism.” [22] Among diners-out, James’s only rival in the winter of 1878-9 may have been Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the most notorious of the aesthetes, who had just come down from Oxford and eagerly threw himself into the same round of dinner engagements and bookish soirées, “enthralling many and shocking the rest with his calculated outrageousness.” [23] Freedman carefully maps out what he terms “the quarrels of affinity” between James, Wilde, Walter Pater and other leading figures in the British aesthetic movement. [24] The embodiment of refined indolence (he is “‘so indolent,’” as Madame Merle quips in Chapter XIX, “‘that it amounts to a sort of position’”), Osmond displays all the hallmarks of the Victorian aesthete, possessed of a retiring disposition, a treasured horde of faded tapestries and bibelots, and even a flair for epigrammatic wit. He is “the incarnation of taste,” as Ralph correctly observes; but Isabel’s cousin also recognizes that, for Osmond, the exaltation of taste disguises a malevolent will to power: “‘have you ever seen an exquisite taste ruffled?’” he warns her.

If at last we come to see in Osmond an almost grotesque perversion of the sense of beauty, we must also acknowledge that most of the other sensitive and discerning characters in the novel betray his affinity for connoisseurship and even his willingness to transform others into accessories whose principal function is to confirm the superiority of their taste. That Ralph Touchett should share these ambiguous traits is crucial to James’s construction of dramatic irony. Certainly it is worth noting that one of Ralph’s earliest impulses upon first meeting his American cousin is to think of Isabel (in Chapter VII) as a beautiful object serendipitously delivered up for his private contemplation:

“A character like that,” he said to himself, “is the finest thing in nature. It is finer than the finest work of art —than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral. It is very pleasant to be so well-treated where one least looked for it. I had never been more blue, more bored, than for a week before she came; I had never expected less that something agreeable would happen. Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall —a Greek bas-relief to stick over my chimney-piece. The key of a beautiful edifice is thrust into my hand, and I am told to walk in and admire. My poor boy, you have been sadly ungrateful, and now you had better keep very quiet and never grumble again.”

Despite its playful irony, such a passage cannot efface the ominous echo of Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842): “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall.” Already Ralph’s unspoken thoughts prefigure Osmond’s desire (expressed in Chapter XXVIII) to appropriate Isabel and place her among his collection of choice objects. In Ralph’s case, as we see in the passage above, the aesthetic commodification of Isabel overrides an initial, more Transcendental, understanding of her rare value; and his confusion (or conflation) of these different registers makes it almost inevitable that Ralph’s generous instincts will be tainted, however subtly, by self-interest. Endowing Isabel with a fortune —“‘I call people rich when they are able to gratify their imagination,’” he tells his father in Chapter XVIII —enables his cousin to gratify hers, but it also enhances her potential to gratify his.

Isabel’s tragedy, too, is inseparable from her yearning for aesthetic refinement, marked out from the start by the distinctive vocabulary the author employs to introduce her character. With her “delicate, desultory, flame-like spirit,” Isabel seems to aspire to the ecstasy, the “success in life” promised by the Conclusion of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873): “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,” or, as Ralph expectantly hopes, “to drain the cup of experience.” [25] But even though Isabel shies away from her cousin’s extravagant urgings (“‘I don’t wish to touch the cup of experience,’” she answers, “‘It’s a poisoned drink!’”), she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, fascinated by their seeming incarnation of every social art and their estimable observance of every social form. “To be so graceful, so gracious, so wise, so good, and to make so light of it all,” such is Isabel’s admiring vision of Madame Merle in Chapter XIX: “that was really to be a great lady.” Osmond charms his intended with language not unlike Ralph’s —“‘Go everywhere,’” he tells her in Chapter XXIX, “‘do everything; get everything out of life’” —and in marrying him (“the first gentleman in Europe”) Isabel believes they will live together in a kind of rarefied aesthetic harmony, “for he pointed out to her,” as she recalls in Chapter XXXXII,

so much of the baseness and shabbiness of life, opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the depravity, the ignorance of mankind, that she had been properly impressed with the infinite vulgarity of things, and of the virtue of keeping one’s self unspotted by it.

For all of her innocence, Isabel is tainted by an aestheticism not unlike Osmond’s, and her culpability dooms her (as Dorothea Krook gravely intoned) “to earn its own retribution.” [26]

Fragmentary evidence suggests that Henry James first conceived the idea for The Portrait of Lady shortly after completing The American in 1876. In October of that year, James confided to his friend William Dean Howells (who, as editor of the Atlantic, had happily published the story of Christopher Newman, described in the first chapter as a “powerful specimen of an American”) that the subject of his next novel was to be an Americana
—the adventures of a female Newman, who of course equally triumphs over the insolent foreigner.” [27] When Howells advised him that the Atlantic would have to make room for other contributors and could not take another long novel so soon, James readily conceded that his new subject could not be squeezed into an abbreviated story-line. “It is the portrait of the character & recital of the adventures of a woman,” he anticipated, “a great swell, psychologically; a grande nature
—accompanied with many developments”: a work for which he would want “full elbow room.” [28] Early in 1878 James boasted to his mother that his new story would be to The American “as wine unto water” —“the one,” he promised, “that will cover you with fame.” [29] But his progress on the novel was impeded by many other publishing commitments that crowded his itinerary and absorbed his creative energy: French Poets and Novelists (1878), The Europeans (1878); “Daisy Miller” (1878); Confidence (1879); his critical biography Hawthorne (1879); and Washington Square (1880); besides six more short stories and dozens of other essays and reviews that were serialized from 1878-80. In the midst of these other projects, most of which he considered mere pot-boiling necessities, James confessed a yearning to get back to the story of his “Europeanizing heroine” which, “begun some time, since has remained an aching fragment.” [30] Besides all the other work that he did complete, James deliberately declined to take on other potentially lucrative projects (resisting an offer of $1000, for example, to write a critical biography of Dickens for Macmillan’s English Men of Letters Series), preferring to concentrate his creative energy on The Portrait of a Lady. [31] James also refused the chance to become a correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser and the New York Times, telling the editor of the former, “No rate of payment, however high, would make it worth my while.” [32]

Nevertheless, by late autumn 1879 his assiduous literary labor had earned James the privilege of a European sojourn (where he intended to relieve the ache and return to the fragment), but a particularly severe winter in Italy discouraged him from going south from Paris just then. Instead he returned to his lodgings in Bolton Street, where he much preferred to “sit poking my fire, instead of shuddering among the Appenines.” [33] James continued to plug away at his novel, even as London’s “greasy fogs & eternal candle-light” made him yearn for the Italian holiday he had been obliged to forego. “I keep thinking of Italy,” he told his American friend Grace Norton, “& of my unfulfilled design of going there in the autumn, which haunts me still & will, I trust, woo me across the Alps some time during the spring.”
[34] By mid-March 1880, he was ready to abandon London for the milder beneficence of southern climes. From Folkestone he sailed to France, lingered in Paris for a few days, and then made his way to Florence, where he took up residence in the Hotel de l’Arno, with a view of the ochre-stained river below and the Tuscan hillside beyond, dotted with imposing villas. One of these, the Villa Castellani at Bellosguardo, already known to James, was that of his old American friends the composer Francis Boott (1813-1904) and his painter-daughter Elizabeth (Lizzie [1846-88]), which would become the acknowledged inspiration for Gilbert Osmond’s broodingly sinister domicile; as James would recall in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), he drew on the image of “[A]n Italianate bereft American with a little moulded daughter in the setting of a massive old Tuscan residence,”
[35] but in the realm of fiction gave it a very different sense. Excursions to Naples and Rome would delay further his progress on the novel, but also provided him with renewed occasion to reflect upon his work’s deeper undercurrents. “There is such an element of sadness in one’s enjoyment of Rome,” he tellingly confessed: “I don’t know why, but it’s a fearfully melancholy pleasure.”
[36] By the end of his novel, James would know why; and so would his remarkable heroine, Isabel Archer.

Late in the book, Isabel engages her livery and drives out into the Roman Campagna, alone. “She wished to be far away,” James writes,

under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winters day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered.

Small as her impulse is, it, too, is part of a larger record —more specifically a literary record —which confirms Isabel’s sisterhood with other notable heroines (Amy Dorrit in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Miriam in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch) who also seek respite from their troubles in the countryside beyond the gates of Rome. But the past offers no solution to Isabel Archer’s very modern predicament —a marriage turned loveless and imprisoning, but one she has chosen deliberately as the answer to her fate.

Decades later, when he was composing a Preface for the revised version of the novel (which would comprise the third and fourth volumes of the New York Edition [1907-09]), James acknowledged at least some portion of Isabel’s literary genealogy as he discussed the more general problem of constructing an imposing narrative about so slender a donnée: merely that of “a certain young woman affronting her destiny.” “By what process of logical accretion,” James asked, “was this slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?” He found his answer largely in the work of George Eliot, whose various heroines —Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver and Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth —confirmed for him “how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering.” James’s omission of Dorothea Brooke from this list is telling. As J. Hillis Miller has observed, “By mentioning several of George Eliot’s heroines but not his most likely ‘source,’ James obliquely confesses to his indebtedness while at the same time putting the reader off the scent.” [37] But in Eliot’s sprawling novels (as well as in the plays of Shakespeare —
Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice are the examples James gives), the heroine’s fate was never the sole minister of the work’s appeal. In The Portrait of a Lady, James endeavoured to transcend the felt limitations of even these mighty predecessors, to brave the challenge, and to find a significant form that would both amplify and justify the reader’s interest in the ‘frail vessel’ of a young woman from Albany, New York.

In the same Preface, James recalls, or claims to recall, an inspiring conversation he had had (more than thirty years before) with the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), who was discoursing on “his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture.” James puts some remarkably precise words into Turgenev’s mouth; but however improbable it seems that James is offering a verbatim record, however counterfactual this rhetorical conceit might have been, the American writer was evidently not radically misremembering or misrepresenting the truth. For in the winter of 1876, James wrote to his brother William from Paris about a genial talk he had had with Turgenev, and the language of this document accurately prefigures the fictive dialogue of the much later Preface. “I saw Tourguéneff the other day,” James began,

& passed almost the whole of a rainy afternoon with him . . . He talked more about his own writings &c than before, & said he had never invented anything or any one. Every thing in his stories comes from some figure he has seen —tho’ often the figure from whom the story has started may turn out to be a secondary figure.
[38]

This was all James needed, he felt, and it gave him —as he said in the Preface —“higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual . . . with the germinal property and authority.”

It has long been assumed that James’s beloved cousin Mary (“Minny”) Temple (1845-70) was the ‘encountered individual’ who most affected the author’s imaginative rendering of Isabel Archer. In his late memoirs, describing the most vital years of his own young manhood, James could only think of Minny as “the heroine of the scene” —heroine “in the technical or logical as distinguished from the pompous or romantic sense of the word.” What especially distinguished his cousin, James felt, was her moral spontaneity and generous responsiveness to the force of life in others. “She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder” ( NSB 362-3) —an observation that might just as well serve as a kind of gloss or paraphrase of the novel’s summary characterization of Isabel (in Chapter VI):

Altogether, with her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well and to be if possible even better; her determination to see, to try, to know; her combination of the delicate, desultory, flamelike spirit and the eager and personal young girl; she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism, if she were not intended to awaken on the readers part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant.

When James’s close friend Grace Norton read this passage in the December 1880 serial installment in the Atlantic, she immediately identified Minny Temple as a kind of psychological palimpsest for the book’s protagonist; but James was obliged to qualify her quick discerning perception in one important regard. “You are both right & wrong about Minny Temple,” he confessed:

I had her in mind & there is in the heroine a considerable infusion of my impression of her remarkable nature. But the thing is not a portrait. Poor Minny was essentially incomplete & I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished. [39]

Minny, after all, was condemned to die early; but deep within Isabel’s soul, we are told late in the story (“deeper than any appetite for renunciation”), abides a conviction “that life would be her business for a long time to come.”

James had been enjoying the remarkable freedom of his first independent European sojourn (1869-70) when the news of Minny’s premature death (from tuberculosis) reached him; and his letters home, commemorating her to sacred memory, are justly famous. “Her character,” James reflected to his brother William,

may be almost literally said to have been without practical application to life. She seems a sort of experiment of nature —an attempt, a specimen or example —a mere subject without an object . . . What a vast amount of truth appears now in all the common-places that she used to provoke —that she was restless —that she was helpless —that she was unpractical . . . but what strikes me above all is how great & rare a benefit her life has been to those with whom she was associated. I feel as if a very fair portion of my sense of the reach & quality & capacity of human nature rested upon my experience of her character: certainly a large portion of my admiration of it. She was a case of pure generosity —she had more even than she ever had use for.
[40]

If Minny, with her foreshortened prospects, could find no use for her rare gifts, her cousin assuredly did. Indeed, what is most striking about James’s complex response to the young woman’s death is his remarkable capacity for converting pain and suffering into positive stimuli for moral and imaginative inquiry. The genealogy of so many of the writer’s heroines can be traced back to her: Daisy Miller (1878), Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton (1897), May Bartram in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) and especially the doomed Milly Theale in The
Wings of the Dove (1902). For all of these characters, goodness and innocence are specifically the traits that impel them to defeat —even make defeat inevitable by removing the possibility for the protagonist to defend herself against it. Isabel will be more fortunate than the others, perhaps; but James leaves much to the reader’s imagination by deliberately refusing to supply his novel with a conventional sense of closure.

That radical departure from established form disturbed an important segment of the book’s first audience. Quite a few of the contemporaneous reviews expressed disappointment —for some, even shock —in the story’s untold ending. As another Victorian novelist complained, “it is a most equivocal if not debasing conclusion, and brings us up sharp with a discord instead of the symphony of harmonising chords with which it has been the habit of art to accompany the end of every story.” [41] The surprise for us today lies rather in the scope —even the salacious vitality —of these contemporaneous misreadings, which the author himself sought to correct when he revised the ending of the novel for the New York Edition to leave no doubt about Goodwood’s defeated prospects. The ultimate destination of the “very straight path” to which Isabel commits herself may still be left unspecified —even in the revised text —but we can be sure that it does not lead back to Goodwood’s door. Plot, in this novel, is always subordinate to character.

Isabel, we know, is a great reader of novels —and even imagines that she is living in one, when she first meets an English peer in the second chapter (“‘Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; its just like a novel!’” she exclaims) —yet her mental attitude and behavior consistently repudiate the conventional kind of marriage plot upon which, historically, the English novel has grounded itself. This, surely, is at least partly what James meant when, in the later Preface, he spoke of Isabel’s “affronting her destiny”: in a more typical story, marriage would have been her destiny —and the only one imaginable. The dreary counterpoint of Isabel’s two older sisters —one married to an Army officer and condemned to live “in the unfashionable West,” the other gratefully conjoined to a stodgy New York lawyer (“a young man with a loud voice and an enthusiasm for his profession”) —gives added edge to her yearning for freedom and her naïve, but inescapably Emersonian idealism about the romantic possibilities of her own selfhood. If she is to be married, she will neither be tempted nor coerced by circumstance. (First among her many convictions on the subject of marriage, we are told, is the vulgarity of thinking too much about it.) In The Portrait of a Lady Isabel spurns her obvious choices —decent men of worldly substance and position (Warburton and Goodwood), who would have satisfied any English heroine from Jane Austen on down —obliging the author, so he must have felt, to put in a word on her behalf. “Smile not,” the author warns his readers in Chapter XII (sounding more like Anthony Trollope than like Henry James),

at this simple young lady from Albany, who debated whether she should accept an English peer before he had offered himself, and who was disposed to believe that on the whole she could do better. She was a person of great good faith, and if there was a great deal of folly in her wisdom, those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity.

If Isabel is “affronting” her destiny in this book, James knew that he was affronting the expectations of the nineteenth-century reading public (“the more quickly-judging half” of it in particular) by refusing to subject Isabel’s apparent stubbornness to authorial ridicule. In that respect, The Portrait of a Lady was just unlike a novel, especially unlike the thickly-planted field of Victorian fiction amid which his book was staking its claims.

Instead of ending with the heroine’s triumphant marriage, as so many contemporaneous readers would have preferred, James’s plot submerges Isabel’s ultimate union to Gilbert Osmond: the event hardly figures among the novel’s recorded scenes. (What little we learn of it comes retrospectively, after the curious —but crucial —chronological hiatus that separates Chapters XXXV and XXXVI.) Yet, even though she thinks she is evading a conventional fate —“‘I dont wish to be a mere sheep in the flock,’” she chides Goodwood —Isabel, far from breaking the mold, instead fashions one anew, one that will hold her all the more firmly for her having been so instrumental in shaping it. Much of our interest in James’s heroine arises from the curiosity of knowing exactly how she will come to terms with the unacknowledged pathology of her own choices.

It is worth pausing to note that the complex nature of this dilemma has also invited several dramatic adaptations of the novel, the least auspicious of which was a stage production in 1954 (written by William Archibald and directed by José Quintero) that lasted through only seven performances at New York’s ANTA Playhouse. The British Broadcasting Corporation mounted a full-scale teleplay, written by Jack Pulman and directed by James Cellan Jones, in 1968. In 1996 the Australian film-maker Jane Campion directed a less conventional motion picture adaptation, written by Laura Jones and starring Nicole Kidman as Isabel and John Malkovich as Osmond (Gramercy Pictures). [42] It should also be remembered that, shortly after the novel was first published, the American actor Lawrence Barrett (1838-91) proposed that James adapt it for the stage. The author refused, telling Barrett that he was “mistaken in seeing a drama in it . . . I feel sure that an attempt to convert it into a drama would despoil the story of such merits as it possesses & not give it sufficient others in their place.” “In a word,” James concluded, “I don’t think the action of the ‘Portrait’ vivid enough to keep a play on its legs.” [43]

The subtlety of the work —which unsuited it for the Anglo-American stage —constitutes a large part of its originality and power. So much of importance in this novel lies in what James doesn’t tell us, what he obliges the reader to intuit, to infer from seemingly casual hints and suggestions. This technique is especially crucial to our understanding of the Osmonds’ marital discord, the implied cumulative hurt (if not misery) of their unhappy life together. Until encountering the remarkable inward chronicle of Isabel’s midnight reflections in Chapter XLII, the reader can only piece together the barest of disturbing details: Rosier’s raised eyebrows when Madame Merle informs him that Isabel and her husband think very differently; the young man’s impulsive assertion that Isabel must be childless (“‘Her own children? Surely she has none’” —this not even punctuated as a question); the almost incidental disclosure that the Osmonds’ infant son (“a poor little boy”) has been dead for two years. When the story resumes “in the autumn of 1876,” we can infer that Isabel has been married for not quite three-and-a-half years —a modest stretch of time that nevertheless has taken a disproportionate toll upon her.

Other signs of dissonance register through some of the novel’s most darkly comic lines, as when Isabel tells Warburton (who is politely impressed with the expensive décor of the Palazzo Roccanera) that, if nothing else, her husband “‘has a genius for upholstery.’” Or when, to Warburton’s humble confession that, in the years since he has last seen Isabel, “‘My life has been a blank,’” Osmond blandly interrupts, “‘Like the good reigns in history.’” Distressed by Isabel’s friendship with someone so vulgar as Henrietta Stackpole (Osmond thinks their alliance “a kind of monstrosity”), he can only wonder “at the oddity of some of his wife’s tastes.” Isabel simply responds by saying that she likes to know people who are different. “‘Why then don’t you make the acquaintance of your washerwoman?’” Osmond satirically inquires; to which Isabel drolly expresses her fear that “‘her washerwoman wouldn’t care for her’” (a rejoinder laced with a kind of American humor to which her long-Europeanized husband now is tone-deaf).

With architectural deliberateness, James contrasts Osmond’s dreadful humorlessness (“he took himself so seriously,” Isabel realizes in Chapter XLII, “it was something appalling”) with the generous play of irony and wit earlier afforded many of the other characters whom we come to know. The reader can infer a twinkle in Ralph Touchett’s eye from the moment he recounts the cryptic contents of his mother’s parsimoniously scripted telegrams in the first chapter, even as we ruefully come to learn the price he has had to pay for his detached amusement at the rest of the world’s folly. The mildly subversive irony that he displays towards those around him works especially to encourage us to see his cousin Isabel in a favorable light. Even as he pokes fun at her (we quickly come to feel that his joking is a disguised form of love), Ralph generously helps Isabel to achieve a better understanding of herself, to recognize some of the laughable absurdities to which her temperament disposes her. And even when Isabel’s impending marriage makes genial criticism impossible for him, Ralph still wants to be superlatively gentle, to find the best way to express Osmond’s sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. The joke, of course, finally is on Ralph himself. Having secretly given his cousin the means to marry anyone she chooses, Ralph now is helpless to prevent her from choosing mistakenly.

James supplies much of the novel’s abundant comedy through its minor characters, especially Henrietta Stackpole and Osmond’s dim-witted sister, the Countess Gemini. Old Mr. Touchett has his moments as well, especially when James gives him the freedom to discourse on contemporary literature (and its vogue for local color). “‘We once had a lady who wrote novels staying here,’” the elderly gentleman tells Isabel after her arrival at Gardencourt:

“she was a friend of Ralph’s, and he asked her down. She was very positive, very positive; but she was not the sort of person that you could depend on her testimony. Too much imagination —I suppose, that was it. She afterwards published a work of fiction in which she was understood to have given a representation —something in the nature of a caricature, as you might say —of my unworthy self. I didn’t read it, but Ralph just handed me the book, with the principal passages marked. It was understood to be a description of my conversation; American peculiarities, nasal twang, Yankee notions, stars and stripes. Well, it was not at all accurate; she couldn’t have listened very attentively. I had no objection to her giving a report of my conversation, if she liked; but I didn’t like the idea that she hadn’t taken the trouble to listen to it. Of course I talk like an American —I can’t talk like a Hottentot.”

As an enterprising journalist for the New York Interviewer, Henrietta, of course, talks even more like an American —so much so that Isabel can figure her (to Ralph) as the redolent incarnation of the whole Western continent:

“I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading till it stops at the blue Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta —excuse my simile —has something of that odour in her garments.”

“‘I am not sure the Pacific is blue,’” Ralph responds; but he has to agree that “‘Henrietta . . . is fragrant . . . decidedly fragrant!’” (although her scent is not always to his liking). In the New York Edition, hardly seeking to excuse the simile, James forcibly ramps it up: “‘Henrietta . . . does smell of the Future,’” Ralph concedes: “‘ —it almost knocks one down!’”

Into Henrietta James pumps all that he found comically provincial about the American culture of his time —her relentless national braggadocio (for Henrietta there is “nothing middling” about American institutions, not even American hotels; she finds nothing in Europe that can match “‘the luxury of our western cities’”; even the majestic dome of the Vatican suffers, she is obliged to say, “‘by comparison with that of the Capitol at Washington’”); the commodifying gaze of her eye (which rests “without impudence or defiance, but as if in conscientious exercise of a natural right, upon every object it happen[s] to encounter”); her gaping hunger for publicity (“‘If my next letter isn’t copied all over the West,’” she exclaims, “‘I’ll swallow my penwiper!’”). When Howells complained that Miss Stackpole was too much of a caricature, James admitted that “99 readers out of a 100 will think her so,” but he was not dissuaded. “She is the result of an impression made upon me by a variety of encounters & acquaintances made during the last few years,” he affirmed, “an impression which I had often said to myself could not be exaggerated.” In his later Preface, James would admit that, “in her superabundance,” Henrietta exemplified “not an element of my plan, but only, an excess of my zeal”; [44] but aside from offering a superabundance of comic relief, Henrietta performs many other kinds of narrative service, especially as a naïve prophet of future action. In some ways she knows the heroine better than Isabel does herself; many of her blunt ejaculations (“‘You are drifting to some great mistake,’” she warns her friend) come from the mouth of a foreshadowing American Cassandra.

If Henrietta perhaps unknowingly looks forward, the Countess Gemini proves her serviceability in looking backward. She is the most unlikely of historians, however, for Isabel’s first unflattering impression of her leaves us with no great respect for Amy Osmond’s powers of intellect. To Isabel, the features of this “woman of fashion” suggest those of “some tropical bird —a long beak-like nose, a small, quickly-moving eye, and a mouth and chin that receded extremely . . . The soft brilliancy of her toilet had the look of shimmering plumage, and her attitudes were light and sudden, like those of a creature that perched upon twigs.” (In the serial text, indeed, Isabel later figures her as resembling a cockatoo in her imperviousness to moral judgment.) When Osmond confirms this condescending view, announcing to Isabel that his sister “‘is dreadfully afraid of learning anything,’” the Countess freely confesses, “‘I don’t want to know anything more —I know too much already. The more you know, the more unhappy you are.’” Belittled by almost everyone (Mrs. Touchett dismisses the Countess as “a heartless featherhead”), she still offers a kind of leaden prophecy in some of her speeches —not least when she babbles her false congratulation on the occasion of Isabel’s engagement. “‘I am very glad, for my own sake, that you are going to marry Osmond,’” she tells her future sister-in-law, “‘but I won’t pretend I am glad for yours.’” And she continues:

“When first I got an idea that my brother had designs upon you, I thought of writing to you, to recommend you, in the strongest terms, not to listen to him. Then I thought it would be disloyal, and I hate anything of that kind. Besides, as I say, I was enchanted, for myself; and after all, I am very selfish. By the way, you won’t respect me, and we shall never be intimate. I should like it, but you won’t. Some day, all the same, we shall be better friends than you will believe at first.”

For James, Amy Osmond is more than a vehicle for idle chatter, and he reserves her most important role for the dénouement of his story, when the Countess discloses the circumstances of Pansy’s illegitimate birth and Madame Merle’s fathomless treachery. Like Henrietta, the Countess Gemini is but a wheel to the coach (to paraphrase the later Preface); but, as if to confirm her indispensability, James fleshed out her revelations in the New York Edition, adding hundreds of words to her inflammatory discourse (and thus making it all the more provoking when Isabel fails to catch fire: by revealing the hideous truth of the infamous conspiracy, the Countess “had expected to kindle a conflagration, and as yet she had barely extracted a spark”).

Always admitting her own selfishness, the Countess Gemini has hoped to revenge herself against the brother she has long despised by provoking his dishonored wife to some publicly retributive form of action. But even though the Countess exposes these sordid family secrets with almost operatic flourish (“‘Ah, my good Isabel with you one must dot one’s is!’”), the melodramatic denunciation she wants so much to hear never comes. James’s heroine cannot respond in that conventional register; her tears instead express the pity she instinctively feels for Madame Merle, a mother who has been forced to disown her only child. “‘It’s very kind of you to pity her!’” the Countess announces with almost disappointed scorn: this is hardly the effect she was hoping her damaging words would have. Like Christopher Newman before her —and Milly Theale (among others) after —Isabel Archer rejects a merely vindictive means of finding justice. Quietly defying her husband, going to England to see Ralph Touchett before he dies —and to learn, from him, that she has been loved —these are the more modest forms of compensation that Isabel seeks.

At the end, of course, Isabel rejects another alternative, offered with comparable melodramatic intensity by Caspar Goodwood, leaving the book’s final chapter, as it were, unwritten. The author himself had anticipated that some readers would not know what to make of the book’s conclusion. “The obvious criticism,” he acknowledged in his Notebook,

will be that it is not finished —that I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation–that I have left her en l’air.
—This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity —it groups together. It is complete in itself —and the rest may be taken up or not, later. ( CN 15)

The more perceptive of the story’s earliest readers also felt this, including the editor who first solicited the novel for his magazine. In an important overview of James’s career, published not long after The Portrait of a Lady appeared, William Dean Howells acknowledged the modernity of the book’s outlook and admitted that, for some, the novel would prove a challenge. “If we take [James] at all,” Howells honestly admitted, “we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among which is the motive for reading fiction.” The untold ending of Portrait was, for Howells, a sign and a symptom of an entirely new kind of narrative —one in which “the character, not the fate” of the principal actors was paramount; and in the psychological analysis of motive, no one (not even George Eliot) could match Henry James.
[45]

Howells’s appreciation of James’s talent already was a matter of record. From his earliest days as an assistant under James T. Fields (beginning in 1866), Howells had encouraged his new Cambridge friend and tried whenever possible to make room for his work in the pages of the Atlantic. And once the editorship of that magazine was his alone, Howells promptly accepted almost all of James’s most important early writing: “A Passionate Pilgrim” and Watch and Ward (1871); “The Madonna of the Future” and a series of travel sketches from Rome (1873); Roderick Hudson (1875); The American (1876-77); and The Europeans (1878). By the time James was ready to tackle The Portrait of a Lady, however, he had accumulated sufficient leverage to insist upon advantageous conditions. “I have a desire,” he explained to Howells, “that the next long story I write be really a long one”; and he went on to anticipate that he would “also feel inspired, probably, to ask more for my tale than I have done for any of its predecessors” (for which he had been paid $100 for each monthly installment). With other magazines, notably Scribners, by then competing for his work, in 1878 James was able to command $250 for each installment of the four-part Europeans; but for all of his longer earlier serial contributions to the Atlantic he seems to have received $100 per number. His reason for asking for more now was clear enough: “I must try & seek a larger success than I have yet obtained in doing something on a larger scale than I have yet done. I am greatly in need of it —the larger success.” [46] A key element in achieving that goal was doubling the income from the serialization of his fiction by publishing in both British and American magazines. Harper’s Monthly had been willing to accommodate the author this way (most notably with respect to Washington Square, which would also run in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill); but the parsimonious Yankees who owned the Atlantic traditionally had frowned upon such practice. Still, James knew he could make a particular claim for Portrait, not merely because of Howells’s long-standing support, but also because that writer now was trying himself to secure English serialization for his own work in the Cornhill.

In both novelists we find reciprocating ambition, audibly voiced in another letter to Howells: “Shortly after I wrote before,” James implored, the Macmillans

came down upon me with the assurance that they hold me definitely pledged to furnish them a serial for next year. They are perfectly willing to simultane, & if you can be brought to do so, the thing can easily be settled. Your note to me about simultaning your own next novel has led me to believe that you might be so brought. (You will let me hear by the way, I hope, what has come of my visit to Leslie Stephen —he himself has left town.) With my chance here & my chance at home, it is very difficult for me not to wish to bring out in both places at once, & escape the bad economy of lavishing a valuable fiction upon a single public. If objection to simultaneous publication is a matter of dignity with the Atlantic, there is no reason why it should be more difficult than Blackwood, Fraser, the Cornhill & Macmillan. I hope it won’t, as this will, in this case & all others to come, greatly simplify the producing-question with me —I can always be your novelist if I can publish here also. Try & think I am worth it —worth having on those terms. If you will see it so, I engage to produce the most immortal & fortune-making (all round) works. [47]

In December 1877, Frederick Macmillan had first invited James to consider simultaneous serialization when he saw advance notice of The Europeans, forthcoming in the Atlantic (July-Oct. 1878). James was grateful for the overture, but declined, saying that, “for various reasons, it will be difficult for you to arrange putting it into Macmillans, even should your own circumstances permit.” [48] But now was his chance. Since Howells, too, was hoping to secure simultaneous publication of his own work, he was almost obliged to pressure the Atlantic’s owners to accede to James’s request. [49] After further wrangling about the details, eventually Houghton, Osgood signed off —a major coup for James’s transatlantic reputation. Not to mention his bank account: all told, James would earn a little more than $5000 from both magazines (slightly in excess of $131,000 today). [50]

Knowing that such bounty would be coming in freed James to indulge in the continental travel —and prolonged stays in Italy —that enriched the novel’s atmosphere as he worked toward its completion. The early chapters were dispatched to Macmillan from Florence in the spring of 1880, and James found a duplicate set of proofs of those installments when he returned to London in June. After correcting the magazine sheets, James returned one set to his British publisher and sent the other to Howells for the Atlantic, also now telling his friend that the American serial would have to be delayed by a month’s interval in order for his copyright in England to be safe. The Portrait of a Lady would begin its serial run in the October 1880 issue of Macmillan’s, which appeared on the first of the month. Most American magazines, including the Atlantic, were published two weeks in advance of their cover date, meaning that, were it to run exactly in tandem with Macmillan’s (that is, in the October issue of the Atlantic), James’s story would have been published in the United States on 15 September. First publication on British territory was a legal requirement to secure copyright in England (and the empire), making it imperative that Howells accede to James’s request for a month’s delay. Howells worried that American readers would scurry to find copies of the British magazine as soon as the steamers from Liverpool landed, but James discounted his fears. “The newspapers may speak of my story,” he wrote reassuringly, “but as they can’t steal it, I should think their speaking of it will only advertise it.” [51] Even that effect, however, was disconcerting to James’s American publisher, who reacted angrily when it became evident that the Atlantic was being scooped. James wrote to Frederick Macmillan on 28 December 1880, forwarding a letter he had just received from Houghton, Mifflin, which included a complaint about the early arrival of Macmillan in the United States and the stealing of the American magazine’s thunder: “It appears that it is devoured in the American papers before my story appears in the Atlantic.” Rather hopelessly, James wondered whether it would be “possible to delay the departure of the magazine for America, so as to give the Atlantic a better chance.” But for Houghton, Mifflin, it would have to be catch-as-catch-can. [52]

Even though his novel was so auspiciously launched, James still had to finish writing it, and later correspondence suggests that he gave himself about a six-month margin to complete each installment. When the story was just a promising fragment, he had thought that “6 or 7 numbers of 25 pages apiece” would be needed to see it through; then it grew to eight (although the author hinted that “there may be nine”); with the narrative well under way, James then felt that he would require twelve installments (“a majestic length,” he boasted); and, in the end, there would be fourteen. [53] In a long autobiographical entry in his Notebooks, made in the Brunswick Hotel, Boston, on 25 November 1881, James left a fairly detailed record of his progress: taking up and working over the “old beginning” in Florence in the spring of 1880 and then returning to London. He pushed on with it through the summer and autumn (“ tant bien que mal”), escaping London in August and September, “more or less,” for various sea-side enclaves (“Brighton, detestable in August, to Folkestone, Dover, St. Leonards &c.”), working hard and paying very few visits. He then came back to London for the remainder of the year, “getting on with the Portrait, which went steadily, but very slowly, every part being written twice.” Wanting to get away from the London crowd, the London hubbub and all the other “entanglements & interruptions of London life,” James yearned to go to Venice, where he might “quietly bring my novel to a close.” He went in February 1881 first to Paris (whose charms detained him for several weeks) and then on via Marseilles to the Italian Riviera, spending three weeks at San Remo (where he worked “capitally” and “scribbled for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon”) and Genoa. As March went on James then proceeded to Milan (“working at my tale & scarcely speaking to a soul”) before going straight to Venice, where, apart from a few brief excursions to other Italian places, he remained till the end of June to write the larger part of his, by now, very substantial serial ( CN 219-22) .

Throughout these peregrinations, James’s first task, of course, was plotting out his story, composing his manuscript, and dispatching the monthly parts back to London. Then, as installments progressively were set in type (by the firm of R. Clay, Sons and Taylor) for Macmillan’s, two sets of magazine proofs had to catch up with the author for revision before serial publication in England and America. By July 1881, James also was revising tear-sheets from the earlier numbers of Macmillan’s for eventual book publication in both countries. The author first had assumed that Houghton, Mifflin would use their set of revised sheets as copy-text for making plates for the American edition. But, after learning that his American publisher had decided to purchase a duplicate set of plates directly from Macmillan, James ceased sending his revised copy to Boston. The final installment of the serial was completed (and proofread) on 31 August 1881; but James was still revising tear-sheets for the first book edition in mid-October —just three weeks before The Portrait of a Lady was published, and almost on the eve of the author’s departure for a return visit to the United States. [54]

As described in the Copy-text Rationale, Clay and Taylor set type first for what would be the second British edition, published in one volume in June 1882. Molds of this setting were then used to produce two sets of stereotype plates: one to be used for the 1882 one-volume edition of the novel and the other sent to America for use by Houghton, Mifflin. After this impression was taken, blank lead spacers were inserted between the lines of standing type to expand the physical dimension of the book so that it could reasonably fill out the standard three-volume format for new fiction that was demanded by the all-powerful English circulating libraries (such as Mudies). The one-volume edition of Portrait is closely printed on 520 pages; the more generously spaced three-volume edition required 767. The Macmillan triple-decker appeared on 8 November 1881; Houghton, Mifflin published the first American edition on 16 November (but with a post-dated 1882 imprint on the title page).

Book publication was eagerly anticipated in both countries. Macmillan’s first printing of 750 copies in November had to be supplemented early the next year by a smaller second impression (of 250, dated 1882). [55] Houghton, Mifflin’s much less expensive one-volume edition sold even better. Six thousand copies were printed in the first year of publication —four times as many as any of James’s previous novels. First-year American sales figures for James’s earlier books had been, roughly: Roderick Hudson, 1200; The
American, 2000; Watch and Ward, 1500; The Europeans, 2000; and Confidence, 2500. [56] When James was ready to embark for America from Liverpool, he boasted to his English publisher that he saw copies of his works “in all the shop windows . . . which makes me feel as if I had not only started but arrived.” By Christmastime, an almost giddy author reported again to Macmillan from Cambridge, Massachusetts, that “my book is selling —largely, for one of mine. I hope it is doing something of the kind chez vous.” [57] The ‘larger success’ for which James had hoped seemed now to be his. Making a first visit to his nation’s capital, James even found himself lionized as the author of an important and much talked about book; while there he received, among other social honors, an invitation to meet the President (Chester A. Arthur). “I too am ‘someone’ here,” he told an English friend, “& it will be at a terrible sacrifice of my vanity that I return to England & walk in to dinner after every one, alone, instead of marching with the hostess or the prettiest woman present!” [58]

Flushed with the apparent triumph of The Portrait of a Lady, James felt confident enough in his powers (and possible leverage) to push for a more advantageous arrangement with his American publisher. “Ten per cent. royalty on the retail price of my volumes seems to me a very beggarly profit,” he told Houghton, Mifflin:

Let me request then that it be raised then to [ fifty crossed out] twenty. My next half-yearly account in that case will present a less meagre appearance than the last you sent me [which totaled $23]. [59]

At the same time, James responded quite aggressively to a new invitation from Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) to write another serial novel for the Atlantic. Almost as soon as he arrived in Cambridge, the author arranged to meet with Aldrich to spell out his terms. But not before first buttering him up: “I have just read your ‘Stillwater Tragedy,’” James panderingly wrote on 18 November, “which seems to me beautifully done.” (Aldrich’s novel, exploring nascent class conflict in a rural seat of manufacturing, had been published in 1880 by Houghton, Mifflin.) [60] Having greased the machinery, James would demand from Aldrich twenty percent more for his next work than what he had received for Portrait (i.e., $300 a number, not $250); he would require a full twelve-month span to complete his serial; and again he would insist upon simultaneous (which is to say, prior) serialization in England. [61]

To none of these proposals did publisher or editor agree, and a dissatisfied Henry James soon found himself in the welcoming arms of their arch rival, the mercurial James R. Osgood (1836-92), who had dissolved his partnership with Henry Oscar Houghton (1823-95) in 1880 to start his own imprint. From Osgood James successfully commanded a twenty per cent royalty rate (at least until that publisher filed for bankruptcy in 1885!); and, through Osgood, he also began to negotiate much different terms for the sale of his future work, lumping serial and book rights together in exchange for an augmented sum to be paid upon delivery of his manuscript. Feeling sure that he could place James’s work in periodicals other than the Atlantic, Osgood was willing to assume greater risk, acting as both agent and publisher for a writer of proven appeal. [62] The seemingly rising tide of popularity had begun its swell in 1878 with the succès de scandale and magazine piracy of “Daisy Miller” —which, having been declined by Lippincott’s, was first published in Britain, in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine (June-July 1878), and then quickly pirated by two American periodicals, Littell’s Living Age (6 & 27 July 1878) and the Home Journal (31 July, 7 & 14 Aug. 1878). The demand for James’s fiction had even landed some of it in the columns of American newspapers. In 1884 “Pandora” and “Georgina’s Reasons” were syndicated by Charles Dana (1819-87), the enterprising editor of the New York Sun, who then distributed them to metropolitan papers from coast to coast. “The die is cast,” James portentously announced (even sounding like Henrietta Stackpole), “but I don’t in the least repent of it —as I see no shame in offering my productions to the widest public, & in their being brought home, as it were, to the great American people.” [63]
The Portrait of a Lady gave Henry James a (brief) taste of popularity that he would savor for the rest of his life.

Appropriately enough, it was a writer for Dana’s Sun who, of all the contemporaneous reviewers, best captured the real distinction of James’s Portrait, observing that the author’s style constituted his capital merit:

The adroitness, the flexibility, the neatness of his diction —his felicitous projections of an illusive thought, his arch suggestiveness, his pregnant reticence, his irony, his innuendoes —the smoothness and the gleam which yet betray no mark of graving tool or burnisher on phrase or sentence; all these, and kindred proofs of technical excellence, are incessantly encountered in Mr. James’s narratives. It is this power of expression which is more and more noticeable in the work of this patient and conscientious artist, and in none of his books has it been more vigorously and admirably displayed than in The Portrait of a Lady. [64]

Not all the other newspaper and journal reviewers were so generous. The London Athenaeum simply declared, “It is impossible not to feel that Mr. James has at last contrived to write a dull book.” [65] The author himself had anticipated as an “obvious criticism” that many would say “it is not finished,” and numerous notices duly complained that the story was left incomplete, and that consequently the novel’s title was entirely misleading: the book was not so much a portrait as an enigma, the recesses of Isabel’s character remaining too much blurred, despite the great number of pages given over to close examination of them. This reservation seems closely connected with another, expressed by William Crary Brownell in the Nation. “ The Portrait of a Lady is an important work,” he affirmed; but then went on to qualify his meaning:

It is in fact a little too important —to express by a paradox the chief criticism to be made upon it —or, at all events, the only impression left by it which is not altogether agreeable.

At its peril, Brownell felt, the novel asked perhaps too much of its readers, requiring deliberate study rather than casual perusal to achieve its most serious effects. The risk, as the critic saw it, was that James seemed willing “to dispense with all the ordinary machinery of the novelist” except the close analysis of “subtle shades of character,” so that in place of emotional “fervor,” the reader would have to settle for a much more tepid kind of ethical “irreproachability,” achieved on an uncommon (even, perhaps, atypical) plane of human conduct. [66]

These early reservations about the presumed limits of James’s art —alleging his chill deafness to the full range and amplitude of human feeling —have dogged literary criticism for a very long time. Especially after his later style became more florid (and, to many, impenetrable), James and his methods seemed ripe for parody and protest; and many of his immediate successors in the literary field were quick to jump at the chance. H. G. Wells (1866-1946), Rebecca West (1892-1983), E. M. Forster (1879-1970), and a host of critics after them all complained about the attenuated emotional register to which James was confined; and most would have agreed with the satiric indictment that Wells first had framed in his parodic novel, Boon (1915), in which he asserted that

the only living motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even then relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins. His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focussed on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string. [67]

James’s defenders (beginning with himself —“it is art that makes life,” he insisted to Wells) [68] most often have staked their claims on the unimpeachable seriousness of the writers aesthetic convictions and the ethically superior forms of renunciation that shape the endings of so many of his works (including Portrait). But more recently, criticism has been extending (even possibly overcoming) these arguments, by discovering in James’s fiction evidence of an imagination deeply stirred by and responsive to the energies of the erotic.
[69] These discoveries have been prompted, at least in part, by renewed attention to James’s later revisions for the selective New York Edition (1907-09) of his novels and tales. Assuredly, the changes he made to The Portrait of a Lady have lent considerable weight to this shifting balance of critical perspective.

Sheer volume helps to account for this, as the curious reader will discover by consulting the second Table of Variants in the Cambridge print edition. So numerous were James’s changes to the text that some critics have insisted that the later Portrait can only be thought of as a wholly different novel. The author might have agreed with such an estimate, for, in the face of Scribners’ resistance to the scale of his revisions, James insisted that “what I have just been very attentively doing for the Portrait must give it a new lease of such life as it may still generally aspire to.” [70] A certain logic of textual supersession has tended, over the years, to confirm James’s judgment—at least insofar as popularly available reprints go (most of which have followed the New York Edition text); just as James’s later Preface has tended to shape critical interpretation of the books structural and thematic significances. The Cambridge Edition deliberately gives its reader The Portrait of a Lady as the author first wrote it, allowing us better to see and place the novel in a particular historical and cultural milieu.

Detailed analysis of James’s revisions to The Portrait of a Lady has preoccupied critics of the novel at least since F. O. Matthiessen first called attention to them in “The Painter’s Sponge and Varnish Bottle,” an important appendix to Henry James: The Major Phase. [71] Many other critics have traced out the larger patterns in James’s retouchings (not always arriving at consensus as to their inherent value); but most would agree with Matthiessen that the revised novel gives new emphasis to the inner life of its characters. (Simple arithmetic can demonstrate this: the root word consciousness appears twenty-four times in the 1882 copy-text, thirty-three times in the New York Edition.) If, in 1882, James tells us that Isabel (intrigued by Pansy’s almost preternatural innocence) is fond “of psychological problems,” in the later version we learn that she is fond, “ever, of the question of character and quality, of sounding, as who should say the deep personal mystery.” But the later emphasis on Isabel’s intellectual agility comes at the expense of emotional spontaneity; in the New York Edition text, she is more deliberate, someone who lives more in —and through —her mind, less through feeling and action.

The physical reality of the other characters, however, and especially of Isabel’s suitors, is sensibly magnified in revision. Warburton, for example, first comes to us as “a very judicious fellow”; in 1908 he is instead, albeit in a jocular expression, “a very judicious animal.” When he proposes marriage to her in 1881, Warburton utters his words “with a tender eagerness which [goes] to Isabel’s heart.” His frank avowal strikes the Isabel of 1908 almost with physical force: “These words were uttered with a breadth of candour that was like the embrace of strong arms —that was like the fragrance straight in her face, and by his clean, breathing lips, of she knew not what strange gardens, what charged airs.” Whenever Isabel encounters Warburton in the revised text, she becomes aware of the imminence of physical contact. The spectre of implied nakedness tiptoes through much of the revised novel’s imagery. When the pair unexpectedly meet in the Roman Forum, in 1881 a mildly disconcerted Warburton simply stands there, “blushing a good deal, and raising his hat.” In the later version, he stands there “baring his head to her perceptibly pale surprise.” As revised, this scene now echoes an earlier one when, while kissing Isabel’s hand, Warburton bends not just “his head” to her but rather “his handsome bared head.”

The later version’s burnished masculinity finds even more aggressive embodiment in the figure of Caspar Goodwood, whose last name seems to imply the reliability of well-seasoned lumber, or perhaps a stolidity of male self-esteem (or indeed for many readers an almost nakedly phallic suggestiveness). Even the early Isabel is put off by his looming presence. As she thinks to herself, “There was something too forcible, something oppressive and restrictive, in the manner in which he presented himself.” The cause of Isabel’s later anxiety seems much more thrustingly sexual: “There was a disagreeably strong push, a kind of hardness of presence, in his way of rising before her.” This fear of physical as well as emotional surrender colors almost all of the later Isabel’s perceptions of men —most memorably, no doubt, in her final encounter with Goodwood at Gardencourt. Even as she resists his argument that the demands of freedom and personal happiness should trump her marriage vows, in 1881 his ardent plea tells her, inwardly, “that she had never been loved before. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet.” In the later confrontation, Isabel must brace herself to fend off imminent violation. The New York Edition text reiterates Isabel’s belief “that she had never been loved before,” but then expands the deeper significance of that conviction, pointing the comparison with Warburton:

She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which the others dropped dead, like mere sweet airs of the garden. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet, while the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced open her set teeth.

The ‘mere sweet airs of the garden’ seems consciously to look back to “the fragrance . . . of she knew not what strange gardens.” In a last desperate attempt to persuade Isabel to abandon Osmond, in 1881 Goodwood clasps Isabel and presses his lips to hers: “His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.” In the New York Edition text, the menacing possibility of unleashed sexual energy is given a duration, a reach, a depth and a personal and narrative meaning that becomes in James’s imagery quite overwhelming:

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.

Free, in either text, she is not. To most modern ears, Goodwood’s passionate questioning —

How can you pretend you are not heart-broken? . . . Why should you go back —why should you go through that ghastly form? . . . What is it that holds us —what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this?

—is not merely romantically appealing but self-evidently true. (Apart from the use of one contraction [ you’re], James retained the same language in the New York Edition.) Who would not agree, when Goodwood fearlessly declares to Isabel, “‘You are the most unhappy of women, and your husband’s a devil!?’” But neither James nor his heroine is convinced of Goodwood’s claim to possess her. Darting away from him, Isabel arrives not only at the promised security of Gardencourt but also at a sobering conclusion: “She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.” She will embark for Rome —for Osmond, we presume, though perhaps to honor her promise to Pansy in opposing him —on the morrow.

Goodwood’s questions may be, for Isabel, unanswerable because she has no language adequate to frame her response to them —as critics such as Richard Poirier have explored.
[72] At best she murmurs and speaks randomly, tries to confound his inflamed protestations with bland conventionalities: “‘Are you mad? . . . I beseech you to go away! . . . As you love me, as you pity me, leave me alone!’” The whole logic of Isabel’s career has brought her to this impasse. She has always been somewhat afraid of the freedom she claims most to care for, and almost may be said to take refuge in all the traditionary decencies and sanctities of marriage when she is most challenged to disrespect them. Not unlike Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, who forsakes America only to return to it, Isabel disobeys her husband and yet seemingly goes back to him —to the representative of convention itself. Yet the exact meaning of her return to Rome remains open, and it would be a mistake to think of the novel’s conclusion merely as an exercise in retributive submission. Amid all of her conflicted impulses and uncertainties, Isabel still is capable of catching at least “a mutilated glimpse” of her future, a prospect in which she sees herself “in the distant years, still in the attitude of a woman who had her life to live.” Even at the end, she is yet a creature of possibility.

In the earlier parts of the novel, James establishes a certain ironizing distance between his narrative voice and the heroine whose idealistic temperament provokes his commentary. In the richly suggestive exposition of Isabel’s character in Chapter VI, we learn, for example, that the parochial misjudgment of others has contributed significantly to the young woman’s inflated sense of her own superiority. Her friends and family think of her “as a prodigy of learning” because she is “reputed to have read the classic authors —in translations.” “In matters of opinion,” Isabel has always “had her own way,” so we are obliged to smile when the narrator affirms that she is “probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem” and that she habitually takes for granted —“on scanty evidence” —that she is right. In sentence after sentence, the narrator’s parenthetical asides and deflating qualifications comically undermine the willful basis of Isabel’s stubborn self-reliance; yet their cumulative effect is not to render her character silly or foolish so much as attractively vulnerable, mistakenly confident, earnestly in error. As the novel proceeds, however, James progressively withdraws from it, yielding his narrative authority to the characters (especially Ralph) who best give voice to the generous sympathy Isabel’s innocent nature is meant to inspire. The climactic confirmation of this comes, of course, as Ralph is dying, when his diseased lungs can barely take in sufficient air to afford him speech. “‘You will grow young again,’” he murmurs to her on his death-bed:

“That’s how I see you. I don’t believe —I don’t believe ——” And he stopped again; his strength failed him.

She begged him to be quiet now. “We needn’t speak to understand each other,” she said.

“I don’t believe that such a generous mistake as yours —can hurt you for more than a little.”

“Oh, Ralph, I am very happy now,” she cried, through her tears.

“And remember this,” he continued, “that if you have been hated, you have also been loved.”

The stammering completion of Ralph’s final testament to Isabel’s strength (“‘I don’t believe —I don’t believe —— . . . I don’t believe that such a generous mistake as yours —can hurt you for more than a little’”) is a rhetorical synecdoche for the deferred happiness that still awaits her. The very syntax projects the direct object forward as something Ralph must struggle to attain; his halting words serve as a final prophetic commentary on Isabel’s future life.

Ralph’s loving affirmation of Isabel’s seemingly indomitable spirit helps us understand the enduring popularity of The Portrait of a Lady. James himself famously conceded that, compared to some of his later works, this novel was less difficult to comprehend. When asked in 1913 to help a “delightful young man from Texas” (the future drama critic, Stark Young [1881-1963]) make his way through the author’s oeuvre, James included The Portrait of a Lady on the easier —i.e., the less “advanced” —of two lists of titles he drew up. [73] It is certainly worth noting that, while demand over time has fluctuated, The Portrait of a Lady has never been out of print. Foreign translations were rather slow in coming (although a Russian edition appeared in 1881) but have steadily appeared in many different languages since the 1930s. [74] And yet its continuing appeal surely speaks to something more than this. Just when he had completed the book’s final chapters, James had occasion to console his dear friend Grace Norton, who had come to a difficult pass in making out her own future. “To save —or to try & save, something out of life,” James implored, “that we must all do some day —the day when we feel most strongly how much of it has already been lost.” [75] Braced with a similar vigor of stoic optimism —

To live only to suffer —only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged —it seemed to her that she was too valuable, too capable, for that.

—Isabel’s story affords anyone who has known “the injury of life” a certain chastened hope. If we want to know why this book has earned its place on the roster of the world’s great novels, we might find an answer here. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James already has answered Jean-Paul Sartre’s memorable question, “What is Literature?”: for in its richly detailed pages, the novel anticipates the philosopher’s conclusion that “the final goal of art” is “to recover the world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom.” [76] James understood the grievous necessity of that illusion, and, eventually, so does his remarkable heroine.

*

As we have seen, James wrote to Grace Norton in December 1880 that “the thing is not a portrait” —not a portrait, that is, of Minny Temple. But his response to Daniel Deronda shows that a psychological version of portraiture is his aim —the portrait of a character and a conscience, “the picture of its helpless developed maturity.” The analogy between the novel and painting —and, in particular, portraiture —was often on James’s mind, as in his earlier tale, “The Story of a Masterpiece” (1868), or his later, “The Liar” (1888). It is then surely one of the happier coincidences in cultural history that in 1881, the year that James’s novel appeared, a young American painter named John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon a work that was simply called The Portrait of a Young Lady.

The French judges awarded Sargent’s entry second-place honors that season, a very notable achievement for a painter who was not yet twenty-five years old and who would, of course, go on to become the most celebrated (and sought after) portraitist of his time. [77] His prize-winning picture depicted a young woman (Madame Ramón Subercaseaux) wearing a white dress ornamented with black ribbons (just as we see Isabel in Chapter XI). [78] The instrument’s solid forms of ebony and ivory —almost blocks of pigment —are transposed into the slashing diagonals and more fluid drapery of the woman’s dress; but Sargent accents the composition with two displays of passionately red flowers —one cluster affixed to the lady’s tied-back coiffure and the other, more conspicuously, to the front of her bodice.

The subject is seated at a piano but, her right hand just touching the keyboard, she gazes out inquiringly from the picture plane, as if distracted from her playing by the unexpected entrance of the viewer. Sargent’s Portrait of a Young Lady thus embodies traits of both Isabel and Madame Merle, for the image might easily capture the moment in Chapter XVIII when the heroine finds herself drawn to strains of Beethoven coming from the drawing-room at Gardencourt and discovers a remarkably accomplished woman seated at the piano. Like Isabel, Sargent’s sitter exemplifies both convention (the formality of her dress) and a certain defiant independence (the startling splashes of scarlet); but, like Madame Merle, she also might be seen to embody the instrumentality of art (or artifice), the free forms of her figure and costume almost subsumed by the fixed silhouette of the piano in the background.

James came to know and greatly admire Sargent, and testified in 1887 that, for him,

The most brilliant of all Mr. Sargent’s productions is the portrait of a young lady, the magnificent picture which he exhibited in 1881; and if it has mainly been his fortune since to commemorate the fair faces of women, there is no ground for surprise at this sort of success on the part of one who had given so signal a proof of possessing the secret of the particular aspect that the contemporary lady (of any period) likes to wear in the eyes of posterity.

Reading this, one might be led to think that, in paying this homage to Sargent’s portrait, James was also offering a kind of retrospective approval applicable to the novel that shared its date and (almost) its title. “My admiration for this deeply distinguished work is such that I am perhaps in danger of overstating its merits,” James confessed,

but it is worth taking into account that today, after several years acquaintance with them, these merits seem to me more and more to justify enthusiasm. The picture has this sign of productions of the first order, that its style clearly would save it if everything else should change —our measure of its value of resemblance, its expression of character, the fashion of dress, the particular associations it evokes. It is not only a portrait, but a picture, and it arouses even in the profane spectator something of the painter’s sense, the joy of engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem.

History surely has demonstrated that the same terms of appreciation can readily be applied to the Portrait of a Lady James himself gave to the world in 1881. Its style has saved it when so many other things have changed; and watching the author solve his artistic problem —investing the prospect of a young woman “affronting her destiny” with sustained dramatic intensity —affords us a pleasure similar to that which he found in Sargent: “the slightly uncanny spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.” [79] When, however, James goes on to describe other details of the painting, we realize that all these words of praise are meant not for Sargent’s 1881 Portrait of a Young Lady, but rather for a different work bearing the same title but not exhibited at the Salon until the following year. What he is, in fact, discussing is the monumental full-length canvas of Charlotte Louise Burckhardt (later known as “The Lady with the Rose”). [80]

The curious slip in James’s dating of this picture seems a telling aspect of his commentary, as if, for him, the subject of the success of an American artist working in Europe achieved through a bold portrayal of a young woman naturally associated itself with the publication of his first great masterpiece in 1881. For in this canvas, too, we can see elements of James’s Isabel. Dressed in black satin and velvet, the young lady looks out from the frame as she offers the viewer a single white rose blossom, held delicately by the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. Her pose is somewhat unconventional and her costume rather old-fashioned, “as if,” James wrote, “it had been worn by some demure princess who might have sat for Velasquez” ( PE 219). (In Chapter XXXVII of the novel, Rosier mentally compliments Pansy by imagining her exquisite innocence as comparable to that of “an Infanta of Velasquez.”) Sargent’s first biographer, Evan Charteris, commented in 1927 that few of the artist’s other portraits “have so summarized the spirit of youth; none, perhaps, has rendered so exquisitely its unfolding fancies and aspirations and its inexperience.” [81] James’s Portrait, too, shows Isabel’s “spirit of youth” having to come to terms with the unsuspected limits of her own inexperience. As we see her later in the novel (in Chapter XXXVII),

She was dressed in black velvet; she looked brilliant and noble . . . The years had touched her only to enrich her; the flower of her youth had not faded, it only hung more quietly on its stem.

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, 21 July 1855, in The Shock of Recognition, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1943), p. 247.

[2]  Complete Stories, 5 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1996—99), vol. 2, p. 297. Hereafter cited as CS.

[3] These and other prefigurations are analyzed in Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 84-92, and Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 197-209.

[4] Nathaniel Hawthorne, Complete Works, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882-99), 2: 212.

[5] Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 139.

[6] T. S. Eliot, “The Hawthorne Aspect,” Little Review 5 (Aug. 1918): 50; the quotation from Hawthorne is in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, eds. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 368. Hereafter cited as LC1.

[7] William Dean Howells, “Henry James, Jr.,” Century 25 (Nov. 1882); rpt. Michael Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 234. Hereafter cited as LFL.

[8] F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 292-305, 351-68. Most damaging to James’s posthumous reputation had been Van Wyck Brooks’s The Pilgrimage of Henry James (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925) and Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).

[9] The best modern treatment of Miltonic overtones in The Portrait of a Lady is Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

[10] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Complete Works, 5: 236, 237.

[11] Henry James, rev. of Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot, Galaxy 15 (Mar. 1873): 42-48; LC1 958-66.

[12] Henry James to William James, 5 March 1873, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 6 Books to date, eds. Michael Anesko, Pierre A. Walker, and Greg W. Zacharias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). As each Book covers a specific date range and consists of multiple Volumes, citations to this edition will identify the Book by date and Volume by number: here CLHJ 1872-76, 1: 234.

[13] (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), pp. 86, 113. Other critics have demonstrated the wider range of Eliot’s influence on The Portrait of a Lady. See, for example, Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James, pp. 8-14; and George Levine, “Isabel, Gwendolen, and Dorothea,” ELH 30.3 (Sept. 1963): 244-57.

[14] Henry James, “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” Atlantic Monthly 38 (Dec. 1876): 684-94; LC1 974-92.

[15] Peter Buitenhuis, Introduction, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Portrait of a Lady
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 8.

[16] Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 41.

[17] Henry James, “Parisian Life” [5 Feb. 1876]; Parisian Sketches, Letters to The New York Tribune, 1875-1876, eds. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (New York: New York University Press, 1957), p. 57.

[18] Henry James to William James, 23 Oct. [1876], CLHJ 1872-76, 3: 206-07.

[19]  The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 218. Hereafter cited as CN.

[20] Henry James to Grace Norton, 8 June [1879], CLHJ 1878-80, 1: 203. The standard narrative of James’s assimilation to English society is Leon Edel, Henry James, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott; London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953-72), vol. 2, The Conquest of London: 1870-1881.

[21]  CLHJ 1876-78, 1: 195. “My name is Legion; for we are many” is the reply of the unclean spirit to Jesus in Mark 5:9 in the episode of the Gadarene swine; Christ casts them out into a herd of two thousand pigs, who drown themselves.

[22] Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 147, 146.

[23]  Ibid., p. 146.

[24]  Ibid., p. 171.

[25] Walter H. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1873), p. 210.

[26] Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 58.

[27] Henry James to William Dean Howells, 24 Oct. [1876], LFL 123.

[28] Henry James to William Dean Howells, 2 Feb. [1877], LFL 125.

[29] Henry James to Mary Robertson Walsh James, 15 March [1878], CLHJ 1876-78, 2: 63.

[30] Henry James to William Dean Howells, 17 June [1879], LFL 135.

[31] Henry James to Henry James, Sr., 11 Jan. 1880, CLHJ 1878-80, 2: 89.

[32] Henry James to Delano A. Goddard, 2 Sept. [1879], ibid. 2: 3.

[33] Henry James to Henry James Senior, 16 Dec. [1879], ibid. 2: 56.

[34] Henry James to Grace Norton, 21 Dec. 1879, ibid., 2: 69; Henry James to Grace Norton, 17 Jan. [1880], ibid., 2: 98.

[35]  Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Collister (1914; rpt. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011) , p. 379. Hereafter cited as NSB.

[36] Henry James to Sarah Butler Wister, 16 April [1880] CLHJ 1878-80, 2: 159.

[37] J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 53.

[38] Henry James to William James, 8 Feb. [1876], CLHJ 1872-76, 3: 66. The most comprehensive analysis of Turgenev’s impact on James is still Daniel Lerner, “The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James,” Slavonic and East European Review, 20 (1941): 28-54.

[39] Henry James to Grace Norton, 28 Dec. 1880, CLHJ 1880-83, 1: 135.

[40] Henry James to William James, 29 March [1870], CLHJ 1855-72, 2: 341-42.

[41] [Margaret Oliphant], rev. of The Portrait of a Lady, Blackwood’s Magazine 131 (March 1882), in Roger Gard (ed.), Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 103.

[42] For critical commentary on the last of these productions, see Nancy Bentley, “Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman: Jane Campion’s Portrait in Film,” Henry James Review 18 (1997), 17-49; and Michael Anesko, “The Consciousness on the Cutting Room Floor: Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady,” in John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James on Stage and Screen (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 177-89.

[43] Henry James to Lawrence Barrett, 18 July [1884], CLHJ 1883-84, 2: 170, 171.

[44] Henry James to William Dean Howells, 5 Dec. [1880], LFL 157.

[45] William Dean Howells, “Henry James, Jr.,” LFL 231.

[46] Henry James to William Dean Howells [14 or 15 July 1879], LFL 136.

[47] Henry James to William Dean Howells, 19 Aug. [1879], LFL 138.

[48]  The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan 1877-1914: All the Links in the Chain, ed. R. S. Moore (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 11 . Hereafter cited as HJ-M.

[49] At the time James was negotiating the sale of serial rights to the Atlantic, the magazine was controlled by the publishing partnership of Henry O. Houghton and James R. Osgood. That corporation was dissolved in May 1880, and the Atlantic became the property of the new firm of Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Osgood continued operations under the imprint of James R. Osgood and Company, taking with him many of the former firm’s most coveted authors (including Howells and James); but his often-reckless business dealings drove the publisher into bankruptcy in 1885. The best account of this turbulent era of Boston publishing is Ellen B. Ballou, The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin’s Formative Years (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).

[50] For details relating to James’s literary income, see Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Appendix B. Modern currency equivalents have been set using The Inflation Calculator at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi.

[51] Henry James to William Dean Howells, 18 Aug. [1880], LFL 13.

[52] Henry James to Frederick Macmillan, 28 Dec. [1880], HJ-M 57.

[53] The book’s growing dimensions can be traced in LFL 136, 154, 155 ; HJ-M 42; and CLHJ 1880-83, 1: 228-29.

[54] The complicated sequence of deliveries of manuscript, proofs, and revised tear-sheets for book publication can be patched together from letters to various correspondents, published in CLHJ 1880-83, 1: 183-84, 228-29, 230-31, 246, 249, 257-58.

[55] Macmillan and Co. Editions Book, 266 (Macmillan Company Archive, Basingstoke, UK). One-thousand copies of the one-volume second Macmillan edition were printed in June 1882.

[56] These figures were tallied from production records deposited at the Houghton Library, Harvard University (Houghton Mifflin Archive, fMS Am 2030 [1517]).

[57] Henry James to Frederick Macmillan, 20 Oct. [1881] and 27 Dec. [1881], HJ-M 66, 67.

[58] Henry James to Sir John Clark, 8 Jan. [1882], CLHJ 1880-83, 2: 66.

[59] Henry James to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 23 Nov. [1881], ibid., 2: 26. James acknowledged receipt of $22.95 in royalties in a note to Houghton, Mifflin dated 5 Nov. [1881], ibid., 2: 7.

[60] Henry James to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 18 Nov. [1881], ibid., 2: 20.

[61] Henry James to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 23 Nov. [1881], ibid., 2: 24.

[62] For details of James’s new relationship with Osgood, see Anesko, “Friction with the Market,” pp. 83-85.

[63] Henry James to Alice James, 5 Feb. [1884] CLHJ 1883-84, 2: 10. For other details about the syndication scheme, see Charles Johanningsmeier, “Henry James’s Dalliance with the Newspaper World,” Henry James Review 19 (1998): 36-52.

[64] M[ayo] W[illiamson] H[azeltine], “Mr. James’s New Novel,” New York Sun (27 Nov. 1881), in Kevin. J. Hayes (ed.), Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 12-23.

[65] Review of The Portrait of a Lady, Athenaeum 2822 (26 Nov. 1881), ibid., p. 121.

[66] [W. C. Brownell], rev. of The Portrait of a Lady, Nation 34 (Feb. 1882), ibid., pp. 145, 146, 148.

[67] The most convenient account of the James-Wells argument is Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and their Quarrel, eds. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958); the quoted passage occurs on page 248. See also Rebecca West, Henry James (London: Nisbet, 1916); E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927); and, for negative influence if nothing else, Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James (New York: Dutton, 1925).

[68] Henry James to H. G. Wells, 10 July 1915, Henry James Letters, 4 vols., ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974-84), 4: 770. Hereafter cited as HJL.

[69] Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1.

[70] Henry James to Charles Scribner’s Sons, 12 June 1906, HJL 4: 408-09.

[71] London: Oxford University Press, 1944.

[72] See, for example, Poirier’s discussion of the recurrent suggestions of sexual fear in Isabel’s reactions to Goodwood in The Comic Sense of Henry James (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 244.

[73] Henry James to Fanny Prothero, 14 Sept. 1913, HJL 4: 683.

[74] See Timeline: European Reception of Henry James, 1875-2005, in Annick Duperray (ed.), The Reception of Henry James in Europe (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. xxiv-xlviii.

[75] Henry James to Grace Norton, 18 Aug. [1881] CLHJ 1880-83, 1: 251.

[76] Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 57.

[77] Sargent was the natural choice for the portrait of James himself, commissioned to mark his seventieth birthday, in 1913, and which is now part of the permanent collection in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

[78] One contemporary critic, Maurice du Seigneur, extolled Sargent’s portraits as having nothing of “ la pose forcée de l’atelier“ (the forced pose of the studio) and as possessing instead “ la vie, le mouvement, l’allure dégagée, la couleur franche” (life, movement, a relaxed aspect, pure colors), while proclaiming this work in particular as “ tout simplement un chef-d’œuvre“ (quite simply a masterpiece) ( L’Art and les Artistes au Salon de 1881 [Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1881], p. 204).

[79] “John S. Sargent,” in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956) , pp. 218, 219. Hereafter cited as PE. This essay was first published in Harper’s Monthly 75 (Oct. 1887): 683-91; and was then collected in Picture and Text (New York: Harper’s, 1893).

[80] Marc Simpson, Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 17-69.

[81]  John Sargent (New York: Scribner’s, 1927), p. 54