Henrietta's granddaughter

In 1996 Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady opened to negative responses, though Campion's star was high because of The Piano's 1993 success. Portrait features Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, supported by John Malkovich, Viggo Mortensen, and Sir John Gielgud, among others. Kidman could carry a film now; then she was neither a star nor a respected actor. Malkovich was a respected actor associated with manipulative parts such as his role of Gilbert Osmond in Portrait. However well-regarded, the rest of Portrait's cast were moving modestly either up or down the stairway to stardom – with the exceptions of Gielgud, whose part is limited, and Mortensen, whose Aragorn was not yet a gleam in Peter Jackson's eye. Inevitably, Portrait was marketed as “a film by Jane Campion,” “the director of The Piano.”

So we begin by asserting The Portrait of a Lady as a director's film, the work of an auteur. Auteur films manifest an artistic personality through theme, style, or both; Campion's films prove the concept's value. All her films have played with narrative structure, exhibited a distinctive visual and aural style, and explored power struggles within families and between men and women. Campion's auteurism makes her Portrait a work of art itself, rather than a poor relation of Henry James's original.

James's status as a great novelist is a given, but who is this New Zealand-born, Australian-trained woman to make a film of one of his greatest novels? It is as if Henrietta Stackpole's granddaughter had set out to tell the story from her point of view.

Opinions express values, and values may change, but where do we learn them in the first place?

A study of her heroes shows that Jane Austen changed her opinion of gentlemanly deportment, concluding that the active life of service to others should be most valued. From valuing, in principle, the life of leisure because it was necessary to a gentleman's development as a model for lesser citizens, she came to value the active life of industrious service to others. Austen's governing principles of life were generally those espoused and promulgated by the influential conduct books of her youth. Such books, unlike the novels of their time, taught young women how to behave properly as well as told women what society expected of them. From such books Austen learned what her society respected and valued. In contrast, then, as now, many people have expressed concern that young women will be misled by what they read in novels, especially since some novels – romances, for example (then and now) – are unrealistic and may lead to false expectations of what life offers.

Although President Clinton is quoted as saying that he couldn't understand “what all the fuss [was] about,” The Piano won three U.S. Academy Awards in 1994, for best actress (Holly Hunter), best supporting actress (Anna Paquin, the youngest actress ever to win the award), and for best screenplay (Jane Campion). In 1993 it also shared top French honors, the Cannes film festival's prestigious Palme d'or (with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine), making Jane Campion the first woman and the first New Zealander to win this award. In the wake of its Cannes success, The Piano received extraordinary critical and popular attention, and by the time it opened in the United States, in late 1993, word of mouth about it practically assured its commercial success.

Like Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), though, The Piano generated a popular discussion that was often as divided as it was intense.