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The First Masterpiece: The Portrait of a Lady (1881 edition)

$300.00

If you read one thing by Henry James, this should be it. After several novels of varying degrees of competence, James, in his late 30s, wrote a book that would become a landmark in literary history. No other novel I know gives so exhilarating a sense of a writer coming into mastery. In Isabel Archer, the novel’s heroine, James writes one of the great characters in literature, a young woman, determined to take the reins of her own existence, who makes a devastatingly wrong choice—and then bravely faces the consequences. It’s also in this novel—in its famous Chapter 42, written a few years before Henry’s brother, William James, coined the term “stream of consciousness”—that James invents a brilliant new approach to the representation of consciousness in fiction.

Note: We will be reading the original, 1881 edition of Portrait, not the heavily revised New York Edition published at the end of James’s life. Please be sure to get the right text, which is the version used in the Penguin edition.

Schedule: Saturdays, 1:00 – 2:30pm ET

9/19: Chapter 1 – Chapter 17

9/26: Chapter 18 – Chapter 30

10/3: Chapter 31 – Chapter 42

10/10: Chapter 43 – Chapter 55 (end)

Application for full and half scholarships available here. Applications will close on September 1.

If you read one thing by Henry James, this should be it. After several novels of varying degrees of competence, James, in his late 30s, wrote a book that would become a landmark in literary history. No other novel I know gives so exhilarating a sense of a writer coming into mastery. In Isabel Archer, the novel’s heroine, James writes one of the great characters in literature, a young woman, determined to take the reins of her own existence, who makes a devastatingly wrong choice—and then bravely faces the consequences. It’s also in this novel—in its famous Chapter 42, written a few years before Henry’s brother, William James, coined the term “stream of consciousness”—that James invents a brilliant new approach to the representation of consciousness in fiction.