A Portrait of the Lady in Modern American Literature is a collection of fifteen original essays, and a reprint of a classic essay, that reconsiders the figure of the woman in distress in canonical American texts. Approached from the method of close reading and the theoretical perspective of gender theory, these essays look at the forgotten women at the heart of such beloved works as The Tragic Muse, The Awakening, The Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, Machinal, Passing, The Sound and the Fury, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Hours. In taking up the famous question “What does a woman want?” this collection finds some answers in artistic endeavour, political agency, freedom, and – above all – independence.

“The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.”-Rebecca West “A fairy tale in reverse.” -The Sunday Times Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as one of the towering works of Victorian literature; an exceptional examination of the disparate nature between Americans and Europeans, and the divides between contentment and money. Isabel Archer, one of the most compelling heroines of American literature, is at the center of this moving story about the manners and mores of 19th Century life. The Portrait of a Lady opens as the beautiful and fiery American Isabel Archer travels to England to visit her wealthy Aunt Touchett. She is introduced her Uncle Touchett, her cousin Ralph, and the local nobleman, Lord Warburton, who wastes no time in asking for Isabel’s hand in marriage. In character with Isabel’s independent spirt, she refuses the proposal, and while on a trip to London receives a second proposal from an American suitor; once again, she refuses. When she learns that her uncle is deathly ill, Isabel returns to the Touchett home, where she inherits a great fortune following his death. Traveling to Italy with her Aunt as a great heiress, she is introduced to Gilbert Osmond, a self-centered and calculating American expatriate. Despite the warnings from her family and friends, Isabel falls for Osborne and in turn is pulled the darkness of deception. The Portrait of a Lady is a tragic yet humane masterpiece of American literature. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Portrait of a Lady is both modern and readable.

A collection of essays on Henry James's most appealing and accessible novel.

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.

The first study of the role of the newspaperwoman in American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, this book recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells and fictional characters like Henrietta Stackpole, the lady-correspondent in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. It chronicles the exploits of a neglected group of American women writers and uncovers an alternative reporter-novelist tradition that runs counter to the more familiar story of gritty realism generated in male-dominated newsrooms. Taking up actual newspaper accounts written by women, fictional portrayals of female journalists, and the work of reporters-turned-novelists such as Willa Cather and Djuna Barnes, Jean Marie Lutes finds in women's journalism a rich and complex source for modern American fiction. Female journalists, cast as both standard-bearers and scapegoats of an emergent mass culture, created fictions of themselves that far outlasted the fleeting news value of the stories they covered. Front-Page Girls revives the spectacular stories of now-forgotten newspaperwomen who were not afraid of becoming the news themselves—the defiant few who wrote for the city desks of mainstream newspapers and resisted the growing demand to fill women's columns with fashion news and household hints. It also examines, for the first time, how women's journalism shaped the path from news to novels for women writers.

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