Portrait of a Novel

<p>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.</p>