THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Item Details

Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1882, publisher's cloth, cover and spine stamped in gilt

First American edition, Near fine

 

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First American edition (Edel & Laurence A16a; BAL 10553; Sadleir 1281; Connolly, The Modern Movement 1). Shaken, minor rubbing to extremities, else a near fine copy.

Reprint edition of James's most popular and enduring novel. 

"Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a 'plot'... but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements of a 'subject', certainly of a setting, were to need to be super added" (James, Preface to the New York edition of the novel, 1907).

Henry James's novel follows the character of Isabel Archer from New York to England and Rome as she maneuvers amorous advances and the burden of sudden wealth. James regularly sought the complexities of the Anglo-American dynamic and interplay as material for his writing, reflecting his identity as an American citizen that spent a vast portion of his life in Europe (eventually becoming a British citizen in 1915).

Having first appeared serially in Macmillan's Magazine and Atlantic Monthly from October 1880, The Portrait of a Lady in book form followed in November 1881. The first impression of 750 copies was issued in two variant colors of cloth (no precedence has been established between the two), with this reprint arriving in January of 1882 with most sets being issued with advertisements dated December 1881.

"Although Hawthorne had written of Americans in Europe, James brought them into the field of literature, they became his special subject, his donnée. It was through him that the world of the American expatriates first found its voice ... The Portrait supplies a key theme to be revised by the Americans of the "twenties, the expatriate Bohemians" (Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement 1).

 

Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1882; 8vo., publisher's cloth, cover and spine stamped in gilt; 520 pages. Book # 141761

 

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