The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James

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Title: The Portrait of a Lady
Volume 1 (of 2)

Author: Henry James

Posting Date: December 1, 2008 [EBook #2833]
Release Date: September, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY ***

Produced by Eve Sobol

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

VOLUME I

By Henry James

PREFACE

"The Portrait of a Lady" was, like "Roderick Hudson," begun in Florence,
during three months spent there in the spring of 1879. Like "Roderick"
and like "The American," it had been designed for publication in "The
Atlantic Monthly," where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from
its two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from
month to month, in "Macmillan's Magazine"; which was to be for me one of
the last occasions of simultaneous "serialisation" in the two countries
that the changing conditions of literary intercourse between England and
the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and
I was long in writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it,
the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had
rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading
off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread
before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my
windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in
the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the
blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase,
of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my
canvas, mightn't come into sight. But I recall vividly enough that the
response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the
rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as
the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to
concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They
are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings
merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they dr