The Portrait of A Lady (90 page)

In the second volume of his autobiography,
Notes of a Son and Brother
(published in 1914, two years before his death), Henry James remembers the August of 1865, which he spent in North Conway, New Hampshire, with his cousin Minny Temple and her sisters, in the company of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and John Gray, both Civil War veterans, both to become distinguished lawyers. He wrote about ‘‘the fraternizing, endlessly conversing group of us gather[ed] under the rustling pines . . . the discussion of a hundred human and personal things, the sense of the splendid American summer drawn out to its last generosity . . . in especial of my young orphaned cousins as mainly composing the maiden train and seeming as if they still had but yesterday brushed the morning dew of the dear old Albany naturalness.'' He calls Minny ‘‘beautifully and indescribably'' a ‘‘heroine.'' ‘‘Everything that took place around her took place as if primarily in relation to her and in her interest: that is in the interest of drawing her out and displaying her the more. . . . She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder.'' Sadly, within a few years, it became clear that she was dying of tuberculosis.

When he wrote about Minny's sincerity, her curiosity, her lightness touched with gravity, her charm, the play of her mind, her origins in Albany, her orphaned state, he could easily have been describing Isabel Archer. Soon after that summer in North Conway, he began work on a story, ‘‘Poor Richard,'' his sixth to be published, in which a fascinating woman is surrounded and admired by three men, two of whom have fought in the Civil War, one of whom is ill. This story would have been, in its emotional contours, easy for Minny, Holmes and Gray to recognize; it was a version of how they had spent the summer of 1865 with the author of the story. In ‘‘Poor Richard,'' the heroine marries none of the three and ends living in Florence.

So, too, in
The Portrait of a Lady
, written more than a decade later, he gave his lady three suitors, one of them ill, and allowed her to turn down all three, each in a different way, so that in Florence, she exercised her considerable imagination with the help of a legacy from her aunt's husband. (The heroine of ‘‘Poor Richard'' was also independently wealthy.) Thus that summer in North Conway gave him not the exact idea for
The Portrait of a Lady
—idea is too strong a word—but a set of configurations that interested him and held his imagination.

His cousin, who died in 1870, also held his imagination. She had adored the work of George Eliot. She harbored, she wrote to John Gray, ‘‘an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot.'' She wrote to Henry James as she lay ill: ‘‘Have you seen Mrs. Lewes [George Eliot] yet? Kiss her for me— But, from all accounts, I don't believe that is exactly what one wish[es] to do to her.'' Now that Minny Temple was dead, James could conjure her up in his fiction without having to worry about her response. In ‘‘Traveling Companions,'' a story written soon after her death, he could imagine her in Italy, a country she had longed to visit. He could place her there once more in
Daisy Miller
. Now he also sought to write an ambitious novel about her. ‘‘I had [Minny Temple] in mind,'' he wrote to a friend as he worked on the novel, ‘‘and there is in the heroine a considerable infusion of my impression of her remarkable nature.'' But in imagining her as the central focus of a novel, in a large and well-proportioned house of fiction, he had to solve an interesting problem, which he formulated first in a letter to his brother after her death. In life, he could not imagine her married, so free and original was her spirit. His portrait now could complete her, solve the puzzle of her. He wrote to the same friend who believed it was a direct portrait: ‘‘Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished. In truth everyone, in life, is incomplete, and it is [in] the work of art that in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify them, as it were.''

In finding a way to complete her, and to write the second half of his novel, offering his portrait a plot, he allowed his imagination to be nourished by two outside forces—one, a book, the other, an apartment. The book was George Eliot's
Daniel Deronda
; the apartment belonged to his friend Francis Boott, who lived with his daughter, Lizzie, above Florence in Bellosguardo.

Henry James wrote his first piece about
Daniel Deronda
in February 1876 when the first installment had appeared. At the end of that year, when the novel was published, he wrote an extraordinary second piece for
The Atlantic Monthly
. It consisted of a long, invented conversation among three people who had read the book. It made clear that James had, once more, problems with the form of the book and with many of its characters. But he allowed one of his characters this observation of Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine: ‘‘Gwendolen is a masterpiece. She is known, felt and presented, psychologically, in the grand manner''; her husband, Grandcourt, was ‘‘a consummate picture of English brutality.''

So James had in front of him for his contemplation a novel that he viewed, as did his brother William, a failure, but whose central image of marital tyranny, pursued with such skill and brilliance by Eliot, could offer him an idea for his own novel. The drama surrounding the marriage of a passionate woman to a bully had appeared in other novels too, such as Trollope's
Phineas Finn
(1867), in which Lady Laura confessed to an unmarried man her deep unhappiness and sense of entrapment in marriage, much as Gwendolen did to Daniel Deronda, much as Isabel finally did to Ralph Touchett. James had merely to set about refining the passion, the bullying, the entrapment, the unhappiness, the confession, but he did not dilute them; instead, by playing a game between what was unspoken and what was unspeakable, he made his drama more powerful.

Francis Boott, whom James had known in Boston, had reared his daughter, Lizzie, in Italy ‘‘as if she were a hot-house flower,'' as Leon Edel has written. As he worked on his novel in Florence, James visited them very often in their apartment on Bellosguardo overlooking the city, using their relationship as bedrock for the relationship between Gilbert Osmond and his daughter, Pansy, and placing his fictional characters in the very rooms in which his friends lived, much as he had placed Isabel at the opening of the book in his (and Minny's) grandmother's house in Albany.

During the same period, he saw a great deal as well of the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had come with a letter of introduction to him. As Leon Edel has written: ‘‘He turned on the full power of his charm for Miss Woolson.'' She was to become one of his best friends, but as he worked on the book, it was enough for him that she was intelligent, deeply receptive to the sights of the city and utterly American. Like most novelists, he used whatever came his way to deepen the texture of his novel. Osmond and Isabel would walk together in the places in Florence where he and Constance walked. When the book appeared Constance wrote to him: ‘‘With no character of yours have I ever felt myself so much in sympathy. . . . I found myself judging her and thinking of her with perfect . . . comprehension, and a complete acquaintance as it were; everything she did and said I judged from a personal standpoint. . . . I always knew exactly all about Isabel.''

James used everything he knew, including his own complex self, when he wrote
The Portrait of a Lady
. He dramatized his own interest in freedom against his own egotism, his own bright charm against the darker areas of his imagination. He also used the ghost of his cousin; he conjured up real houses; he described the cities of Rome and Florence, which he had come to know and love; he weaved in English manners, which he had, by the time he wrote the book, come to appreciate; and he allowed the books he had been reading, especially the novels of George Eliot, which placed a deeply intelligent and passionate woman at the center, to encourage him to make his young woman even more deeply intelligent and even more subtly passionate. He was fearless in his depiction of the play of her consciousness; her high ideals and her need for freedom were dramatized against repression and dark restriction. In concentrating on her fate in the world, he created one of the most magnificent figures in the large and sprawling house of fiction.

—Colm Tóibín

Selected Bibliography

WORKS BY HENRY JAMES

 
A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales,
1875 Tales

Transatlantic Sketches,
1875 Travel

Roderick Hudson,
1875 Novel

The American,
1877 Novel

French Poets and Novelists,
1878 Criticism

The Europeans,
1878 Novel

Daisy Miller,
1878 Tale

Hawthorne,
1879 Criticism

Washington Square,
1880 Tale

The Portrait of a Lady,
1881 Novel

The Art of Fiction,
1884 Criticism

The Bostonians,
1886 Novel

The Princess Casamassima,
1886 Novel

Partial Portraits,
1888 Criticism

The Aspern Papers,
1888 Tale

The Tragic Muse,
1889 Novel

The Lesson of the Master and Other Stories,
1892 Tales

Embarrassments,
1896 Tales

The Spoils of Poynton,
1897 Novel

What Maisie Knew,
1897 Novel

The Two Magics,
1898 Tales

The Awkward Age,
1899 Novel

The Sacred Fount
, 1901 Novel

The Wings of the Dove,
1902 Novel

The Ambassadors,
1903 Novel

The Golden Bowl,
1904 Novel

The American Scene,
1907 Travel

The Finer Grain,
1910 Tales

A Small Boy and Others,
1913 Autobiography

Notes of a Son and Brother,
1914 Autobiography

Notes on Novelists,
1914 Criticism

The Middle Years,
1917 Unfinished Autobiography

The Art of the Novel,
1934 Critical Prefaces

The Notebooks of Henry James,
1947 Memoranda

 
SELECTED BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

 
Bell, Millicent.
Meaning in Henry James
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Berkeley, Elizabeth M. and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, eds.
William and Henry James: Selected Letters
. Charlottes- ville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.

Blair, Sara.
Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Bloom, Harold, ed.
Henry James (Bloom's Major Novelists).
Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.

Cameron, Sharon.
Thinking in Henry James
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Edel, Leon, ed.
Henry James: Literary Criticism, Vol. 1: Essays, English and American Writers.
New York: Library of America, 1984.

——, ed.
Henry James: Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: European Writers and Prefaces to the New York Edition.
New York: Library of America, 1984.

Graham, Wendy.
Henry James's Thwarted Love.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Holly, Carol.
Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James
. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Kress, Jill M.
The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton.
London: Routledge, 2002.

McGurl, Mark.
The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Moore, Harry T.
Henry James.
New York: Viking Books, 1974.

Pippin, Robert B.
Henry James and Modern Moral Life.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Tambling, Jeremy.
Henry James (Critical Issues).
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Taylor, Andrew.
Henry James and the Father Question.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Tintner, Adeline R.
Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

——.
The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work After 1900.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

A Note on the Text

The Signet Classics text of
The Portrait of a Lady
is reprinted from the first edition, which was published by Macmillan and Co., London, November 4, 1881. Spelling has been brought into conformity with modern British usage.

The first American edition was published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, November 16, 1881.
The Portrait
was serialized in
Macmillan's Magazine
from October 1880 to October 1881, inclusive, and in the
Atlantic Monthly
from November 1880 to December 1881, inclusive.