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

Gorra, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871404087 ISBN 13: 9780871404084

Publisher: Liveright, 2012

Synopsis

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. 10 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College. His books include After Empire, The Bells in Their Silence, and, as editor, the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Review

“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. ...Analyzing James’s letters, journals, stories, and travelogues, Gorra traces the author’s life and literary milieu, alternating a reconstruction of his travels with extensive attention to the novel’s composition and reception. The book reads like an exciting voyage of discovery, beginning with James revising his novel 20 years after it was written, and later depicting his blooming consciousness as an author torn between an American and a European identity. 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. 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’s approach will appeal to scholars, fans of the James family and lovers of important novels and those who create them.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“...Michael Gorra in Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece... 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.”
- Rebecca Mead, New Yorker

“Michael Gorra has...created a book that is an adventure from beginning to end.... There are places... where Gorra gets so close to the making of Portrait of a Lady, he actually crosses over from literary history into the interior of James’s consciousness. The interior world that Gorra imagines, and that we come to inhabit, is so plausible, so true to life, that his Portrait of a Novel becomes a novel―a masterpiece of critical imagination.”
- Alice Kaplan, The Best American Poetry blog

“Masterly and evocative... In his Portrait of a Novel, Michael Gorra also offers an exemplary approach to what remains a complex and fascinating subject.”
- Colm Toibin, Wall Street Journal

“...Michael Gorra in Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece... 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, 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

“Portrait of a Novel does a great deal to explain why James’s book should have proved so timeless, so timely, and so enduring. Incisive, informative and hugely entertaining, Michael Gorra’s ‘tale not of a life but of a work’ is at once a brisk, compressed biography of James... [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)

“One of the many pleasures of Michael Gorra’s book is that he too has loved this novel since he studied it in college, and wants to share his passion for it. He has also taught it for many years, at Smith College, and he has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted teachers should write but rarely do.”
- James Wood, London Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0871404087
• ISBN 13: 9780871404084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 385