NYSL: Michael Gorra on "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece"

Henry James 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 recreating 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 Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club and David 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.

Biographer Hermione Lee, writing in the Guardian, says, "It is a tribute to his book that he makes us feel the life, of the book and its characters and its author, so deeply. He earns the right to end with James's wonderful words, 'There is really too much to say.'"

Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College. His books include After Empire, The Bells in Their Silence, and, as editor, the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.