The Portrait of a Lady

by James, Henry

$38,000 · Offered by Biblio

First edition

London: Macmillan and Co, 1881. First edition of Henry James's most influential novel, in which a young American heiress confronts the limits of her seemingly ideal freedom. "Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater." Inspired by the heroines of George Eliot, James created in Isabel Archer a new kind of protagonist whose dramatic interest lies primarily in her interior life. The remarkable third chapter of Volume III (numbered Chapter 42 in later editions), in which Isabel sits alone by the dying fire, silently weighing the series of misapprehensions that led to her marriage, prefigures the stream-of-consciousness technique of modernists like Virginia Woolf: James himself observed that "it is obviously the best thing in the book." Edel & Laurence note that most copies of the first impression, issued in November 1881, include publisher's catalogues for December of that year, but that some copies, like this one, contain catalogues for April 1881, "probably inserted through error or through shortage at the bindery." The light uniform wear to the upper boards is likely evidence of label removal, as often with this title, which was widely distributed to Victorian lending libraries upon publication. Edel & Laurence A16. A very good set inde

• Publisher: Macmillan and Co
• Year: 1881
• Edition: First Edition
• Printing: first
• Binding: unknown

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