Portrait of a Lady
First written in the 1880s and extensively revised in 1908, The Portrait of a Lady is often considered to be James's greatest achievement. In it, he explored many of his most characteristic themes, including the conflict between American individualism and European social custom and the situation of Americans in Europe.
James proclaimed that “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent reality.” Plot was for him but the extension of character. The novel must show rather than tell — he was interested in why people did as they did, rather than simply in what they did; motive was more important than deed. The observer of the dinner table and the drawing room, the country house and the salon, the library and the smoking room, James was driven, Richard Palmer Blackmur asserts, to excesses of substantiation and renunciation and refinement (in experience and morals and style). If I put Blackmur’s statement more positively, I would say that James in his endless probing of character pushed the novel from pre-modernism to modernism by turning the novel inward, from an outward perspective to an inward one, and by focusing increasingly on a character’s inner life. This transition begins to take its effect with The Portrait of a Lady.
Its formal brilliance makes it the pivotal, unavoidable novel of the late Victorian period, offering us crucial insights into the transition from Victorian to Modernist novel forms.
Considered by many as one of the finest novels in the English language, this is Henry James's most poised achievement, written at the height of his fame in 1881. It is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late.
-a culmination of Victorian Realism and the beginnings of the emergence of a new 'Modernist' style that explores interior states of consciousness as well as the individual's place in society.
-the
James proclaimed that “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent reality.” Plot was for him but the extension of character. The novel must show rather than tell — he was interested in why people did as they did, rather than simply in what they did; motive was more important than deed. The observer of the dinner table and the drawing room, the country house and the salon, the library and the smoking room, James was driven, Richard Palmer Blackmur asserts, to excesses of substantiation and renunciation and refinement (in experience and morals and style). If I put Blackmur’s statement more positively, I would say that James in his endless probing of character pushed the novel from pre-modernism to modernism by turning the novel inward, from an outward perspective to an inward one, and by focusing increasingly on a character’s inner life. This transition begins to take its effect with The Portrait of a Lady.
Its formal brilliance makes it the pivotal, unavoidable novel of the late Victorian period, offering us crucial insights into the transition from Victorian to Modernist novel forms.
Considered by many as one of the finest novels in the English language, this is Henry James's most poised achievement, written at the height of his fame in 1881. It is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late.
-a culmination of Victorian Realism and the beginnings of the emergence of a new 'Modernist' style that explores interior states of consciousness as well as the individual's place in society.
-the