The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, as a general rule, adopts the text of the first published book edition of a work, unless the intrinsic particularities and the publishing history of that work require an alternative choice. With respect to The Portrait of Lady (and several other titles published simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States), the idiosyncracies of publishing history dictate that the choice of copy text be the second published edition, rather than the first.

Like so many other Victorian triple-decker novels, The Portrait of a Lady appeared in England (subsequent to serialization in Macmillan’s Magazine, October 1880–November 1881) first as an expensive three-volume set, that being the preferred format for distribution through the influential private circulating libraries (most famously Mudie’s) that dictated publishing conventions for most of the nineteenth century. For decades, the standard price of the triple-decker was a guinea-and-a-half (31s.6d.) – relatively few copies being sold for individual purchase and almost all taken up by the network of subscription libraries. Accordingly, Macmillan published James’s novel in three volumes early in November 1881, just as the story was concluding its run in the eponymous house monthly magazine.

Yet the order in which the several book texts of The Portrait of a Lady came into being is a complicated one, as has been explained by both Simon Nowell-Smith, in ‘The Texts of The Portrait of a Lady 1881–1882: The Bibliographical Evidence’, and by David J. Supino in Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921 (Second Edition, Revised). Macmillan first set type for what would become the one-volume second edition of The Portrait of a Lady (not published until June 1882), working from James’s revised tear-sheets of the periodical (Macmillan’s Magazine) version that he had made in order to give the firm’s printers an improved copy text. (See the Editor’s Introduction for a fuller account of the novel’s periodical publication.) At this stage, the author introduced nearly 400 substantive variants, recorded in Variants I, below. Moulds of this setting were made by the printers from which two sets of stereotype plates were produced.