Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

by Michael Gorra

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871406705
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/05/2013
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Incisive, informative and hugely entertaining. ... [N]ot only instructive and a pleasure to read, but (as Gorra doubtless intended) it also sends us back to James with a deeper appreciation for his literary technique, his painstaking approach to language and style, and above all, the genius and profundity with which he portrayed the characters who continue to populate our imaginative world and accompany us, at home and abroad."

The Sunday Times (UK) - Francine Prose

"A fascinating book, not just about a storm, but about the hard-drinking, fatalistic lives of commercial fishermen and the families and friends they leave behind with each dangerous voyage."— Colm Toibin Wall Street Journal

"It’s hard to imagine, indeed, that there is much illumination still to offer on this particular author, or this particular book. Yet Gorra has produced a welcome new addition to the shelf."— Nicholas Delbanco Chicago Tribune

"Takes the rare but wise decision to approach James through the channel of a single work... In deference to James’s brilliance, Gorra has assumed the role of a professional prismatist. He peers at the book from multiple angles—those of biography, geography, publishing, textual variation, and mild erotic sleuthing, among others—as if hoping to catch it at an unfamiliar slant."— Anthony Lane New Yorker

"The author’s encyclopedic understanding of not only James, but also his influences and contemporaries, offers a thoroughly illustrated and appropriately tumultuous picture of fiction’s awkward adolescence between stilted Victorianism and modernistic messiness. The reader does not have to love or even be particularly familiar with James’s work to enjoy this book; this is as much a story about the creative process itself, or the function of genius, as it is about any particular product."— Nicholas Mancusi Daily Beast

"Both personal and profound. Michael Gorra’s intense focus on a single work reflects his deep curiosity about this novel and displays his loving scrutiny of it. Gorra’s study, while keeping The Portrait of a Lady, its heroine Isabel Archer, and the years of its creation (1880-81) at its center, roams gracefully through James’s life and art."— Barbara Fisher Boston Globe

"Incisive, informative and hugely entertaining. ... [N]ot only instructive and a pleasure to read, but (as Gorra doubtless intended) it also sends us back to James with a deeper appreciation for his literary technique, his painstaking approach to language and style, and above all, the genius and profundity with which he portrayed the characters who continue to populate our imaginative world and accompany us, at home and abroad."— Francine Prose The Sunday Times (UK)

"In this innovative biography, written with flair and unostentatious erudition, Gorra tells the life of Henry James through the story of the composition of his novel, The Portrait of a Lady. ... The book reads like an exciting voyage of discovery. . . . Gorra’s highly engaging introduction to James will be most attractive to lovers of literature who want to learn more about the craft of novel writing and will likely send readers back to the shelves to discover James all over again."— Publishers Weekly

"Starred review. Gorra’s approach will appeal to scholars, fans of the James family and lovers of important novels and those who create them."— Kirkus Reviews

"A revelation: charming, fresh, capacious, a surprise and a delight."— Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"Michael Gorra—one of the finest critics at work today—paves a way in this study for a new era in literary criticism, one that combines travelogue, memoir, intellectual history, close reading, and—above all—a profound sympathy for the world summoned by a major author."— Jay Parini, author of The Last Station

From the Publisher

2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, Short-listed

Mixing literary criticism with biography and travelogue, Gorra…provides a fascinating "making of" documentary like those that accompany some films these days…Much contemporary literary criticism is so arcane as to be almost incomprehensible, but Gorra's book reads beautifully, closer to belles lettres than to academic criticism…Portrait of a Novel is a model for the once-discredited biographical approach to criticism, a demonstration of how richly rewarding such an approach can be in the right hands. It is an important book not only for James enthusiasts, but for anyone interested in what Gorra christens "the bridge across which Victorian fiction stepped over into modernism."
—Steven Moore

The Washington Post

Gorra (English/Smith Coll.; The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany, 2004, etc.) blends a focused biography of Henry James (1843–1916) with the story of his composition of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Throughout this work of astonishing scholarship, Gorra directs our attention to the quotidian life of James (and his remarkable family), his composition of the novel (which first appeared in serial installments in the Atlantic here and Macmillan's Magazine in England), the significance of the events and characters in the story, and the influence of the novel on the subsequent fiction of James and others. Gorra also blends accounts of his own visits to important James sites in America, England and elsewhere. After a brief introduction to James' life and to the novel, the author establishes his narrative pattern: chapters about the novel followed by others about James' activities, family, friends, typists, contemporaries and so on. We read about his relationships with Atlantic editor William Dean Howells and with James' gifted brother William. We follow his travels to England, France and Italy; we visit his final home in Rye; we view his intimate relationships with Constance Fenimore Woolson and others--including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Gorra does not accept the suggestion that Holmes and James had sexual encounters). We also see him, near the end of his life, visiting and comforting hospitalized World War I soldiers. But most of Gorra's book examines Portrait--its creation, significance and revision (for the New York Edition in 1908). The author argues that chapter 42 of the novel, Isabel Archer's reverie, is "one of James' greatest achievements and a turning point in the history of the novel." Not for all readers, but Gorra's approach will appeal to scholars, fans of the James family and lovers of important novels and those who create them.

Kirkus Reviews