The Portrait of a Lady (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

JAMES, Henry (intro. R. W. Stallman; illus. Colleen Browning). The Portrait of a Lady. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1978.

Large Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xi, 516 pp. Illustrations by Colleen Browning throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. First Easton Press edition.

Henry James published The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, first in serial instalments and then as a single volume, and it established him immediately as the foremost American novelist of his generation. He was thirty-eight years old. The novel he had produced was something new in English-language fiction: a work in which the central action is almost entirely internal, in which the drama consists not of events but of a consciousness responding to events, and in which the reader's engagement is sustained not by plot but by the exquisite precision with which James renders the movements of a mind.

That mind belongs to Isabel Archer, a young American woman from Albany, New York, who arrives in England convinced of her own freedom and determined to exercise it. She is beautiful, intelligent, and possessed of an absolute belief in the possibility of living on her own terms. She refuses two eligible suitors — Lord Warburton, an English aristocrat of genuine warmth and good faith, and Caspar Goodwood, an American businessman of bulldog persistence — and then inherits a fortune that should, in theory, make her freedom complete. What it actually does is make her interesting to Gilbert Osmond, a cultivated, impoverished American living in Florence, whose aesthetic sensibility conceals a will to possession and control that James renders with a coldness that amounts to a kind of horror. Isabel marries him. She discovers, too late, the nature of what she has done. The novel's final chapters — Isabel's recognition of her situation, the choices available to her, and the choice she makes — represent some of the most demanding and morally serious writing in nineteenth-century fiction.

James revised the novel extensively for the 1908 New York Edition of his collected works, rewriting large portions of the prose in his late, labyrinthine style. The original 1881 text, presented in this edition, has a directness and economy that makes the tragedy more rather than less affecting — the reader can see clearly what Isabel cannot.

The illustrations were produced by Colleen Browning (1918–2003), the Irish-born American realist painter who was a full member of the National Academy of Design and whose work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The introduction by R. W. Stallman (1911–1982), a distinguished American literary critic and scholar, provides context for James's achievement within the broader tradition of the novel.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000480