Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Just you wait!’: reflections on the last chapters of The Portrait of a Lady
- 2 ‘As charming as a charming story’: governesses in What Maisie Knew and ‘The Turn of the Screw’
- 3 ‘The sacred terror’: The Awkward Age and James's men of the world
- 4 Blushing in the dark: language and sex in The Ambassadors
- 5 Poor girls with their rent to pay: class in ‘In the Cage’ and The Wings of the Dove
- 6 ‘A house of quiet’: privileges and pleasures in The Golden Bowl
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘Just you wait!’: reflections on the last chapters of The Portrait of a Lady
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Just you wait!’: reflections on the last chapters of The Portrait of a Lady
- 2 ‘As charming as a charming story’: governesses in What Maisie Knew and ‘The Turn of the Screw’
- 3 ‘The sacred terror’: The Awkward Age and James's men of the world
- 4 Blushing in the dark: language and sex in The Ambassadors
- 5 Poor girls with their rent to pay: class in ‘In the Cage’ and The Wings of the Dove
- 6 ‘A house of quiet’: privileges and pleasures in The Golden Bowl
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Critics (and presumably readers) have been tripping up on and debating the ending of The Portrait of a Lady since the novel first appeared in 1881: in those early days with unsophisticated perplexity and often impatience. Even the very sympathetic review by James's friend W. D. Howells in Century balks at James's leaving us ‘to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us’ before submitting to swallowing his treatment meekly: ‘We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction.’
In The Portrait James has constructed his impasse: the spirited Isabel in an impossible marriage, having made what feels like a terminal rupture in disobeying her husband and coming to England to be with her dying cousin, tempted momentarily by the renewed importunity of Caspar Goodwood. But he does not seem to have left us all the instructions for how we get out of it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure , pp. 23 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002