Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix
A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel.
Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.
Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation and, for his work as a reviewer, of the Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. His books include The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War; Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of on American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany; After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie; The English Novel at Mid-Century; and, as editor, The Portable Conrad and the Norton Critical Editions of The Sound and the Fury and The Portrait of a Lady.
Table of Contents
Prologue: An Old Man in Rye xiii
Part 1 A Preparation for Culture
1 The Girl in the Doorway 3
2 A Native of No Country 12
3 A Superstitious Valuation 31
4 Along the Thames 45
Part 2 The Marriage Plot
5 Her Empty Chair 57
6 Proposals 68
7 An Unmarried Man 77
8 A London Life 95
9 The Envelope of Circumstances 105
Part 3 Italian Journeys
10 Bellosguardo Hours 121
11 Mr. Osmond 133
12 Stranieri 141
13 An Uncertain Terrain 155
14 A Venetian Interlude 165
15 Fenimore 174
Part 4 Sex and Serials, the Continent and the Critics
16 Maupassant and the Monkey 191
17 The Magazines 208
18 The Roccanera 222
19 The Art of Fiction 239
Part 5 Putting Out the Lights
20 The Altar of the Dead 257
21 "I Was Perfectly Free" 268
22 Working in the Dark 280
23 The Second Chance 293
24 Endgame 309
Acknowledgments 335
Sources and Notes 337
Index 365
What People are Saying About This
Cynthia Ozick
In his resplendent Portrait of A Novel, Michael Gorra breaks through the remoteness of the Master—that majestic but privately enigmatic figure—so that Henry James now comes to us with the sensuous immediacy of his quotidian reality: the rooms he lived in, the streets he trod, and the very texture of his inmost sensibility. Remarkably, Gorra achieves this living nearness through a deep literary mining of the heroine of a single novel: Isabel Archer of The Portrait of A Lady. In Gorra's ingenious and capacious reading, James stands before us with a clarity of seeing and feeling given to no previous biographer.
Alice Kaplan traces one of the 20th century’s most influential works from its roots in Albert Camus’ Algerian childhood to its destination as a touchstone for a philosophy and an era. Review by Steven G. Kellman.
