The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea continues the story of Isabel Archer, the young protagonist of Henry James’s beloved The Portrait of a Lady—in this masterful novel of betrayal, corruption, and moral ambiguity. Eager but naïve, in James’s novel Isabel comes into a large, unforeseen inheritance and marries the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond. Here Banville imagines Isabel’s second chapter telling the story of a woman reawakened by grief and the knowledge that she has been grievously wronged, and determined to resume her quest for freedom and independence.

The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880-81 and then as a book in 1881. It is one of James's most popular long novels and is regarded by critics as one of his finest.

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.

When she wrote The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood created a really villainous villain who happened to be a woman, partly in reaction to the fact that in Western literature the most meaty, wicked, and therefore interesting parts always seemed to go to male characters. Aguiar (English, Murray State U.) cites the beacon shone by Atwood in introducing her study, which discusses the dawning in contemporary literature of "the season of the bitch": a re-evaluation and reclaiming of female toughness, thorniness, and just plain badness in which women characters are also portrayed as more complete, possessed of motivations, and strongly individual. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Net of Nemesis examines the trope of tragic bond/age, in which humanity is the beneficiary of bonds that nurture and unite and the victim of bondage that confines and restrains. Manifestations of the trope in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, Miltonic epic, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction repeat and vary the trope's central symbol of the net and other, related leitmotifs and demonstrate that such orchestration resolves the conflict between bonds and bond/age and informs the catharsis and transcendence essential to tragedy.

In June 1923, Edith Wharton, who had not set foot on native soil since before the First World War, came home to accept an honorary degree from Yale University. In April 1995, friends of Wharton again convened at Yale. The essays collected in "A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton" represent a portion of the ocmplex and varied scholarly work delivered at that conference. -- From publisher's description.