Portrait of a Novel

Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

7 September 2012

Michael Gorra (Author)

Description

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 shows how this scandalous story came to be written. Travelling to Italy, France and England, he sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles of George Eliot, Flaubert and Turgenev in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create the most memorable female protagonist. A piercing detective story, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written.

Reviews

"...he [Gorra] has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted teachers should write but rarely do." — London Review of Books

"Michael Gorra...has pulled off an astounding feat...in this impressive study...Gorra goes anywhere that strikes his fancy, and the result is splendid: a book to reread in years to come, a model for what criticism can do when happily married to biography." — Literary Review

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Hardback

9780871404084

168 x 244 mm • 416 pages

£23.99

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Ebook

9780871403285

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£17.99

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