Title: Cherbuliez's Le Roman d'une Honnete Femme: Another Source of James's The Portrait of a Lady
Abstract: W HEN HENRY JAMES LOOKED BACK UPON The Portrait of a Lady after more than twenty years, he suggested in his preface to the New York Edition that his conception of his heroine had been the single small cornerstone of the book. This remark might have been interpreted to imply that Isabel Archer had sprung forth like Minerva from the brow of Jove, in much the same way that James claimed the figure of Hyacinth Robinson rose before him like some eidolon from the London pavements, were it not for the fact that James commented that the character of his heroine had been an acquisition made in a fashion not to be retraced: Enough that I was . . . in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that . . . I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. If James was content with this explanation of his discovery, his critics were not, and their search has turned up two ghosts in Isabel's past: Minny Temple and Gwendolen Harleth. James was reticent in public about the relationship between his dead cousin and his heroine, and he was also reticent about some of his literary debts-as shown, for example, by his reluctance to acknowledge Turgenev's Virgin Soil as the source of The Princess Casamassima. In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady he merely hinted at the relationship between Isabel and Gwendolen Harleth and the relationship as a whole between The Portrait of a Lady and George Eliot's Deronda. The critics have made up for James's silence ever since Cornelia Kelley first noticed that his description of Gwendolen Harleth in his Daniel Deronda: A Conversation was
Publication Year: 1968
Publication Date: 1968-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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