THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
First edition of James's finest early novel, a masterpiece of American literature and landmark in psychological realism.
Near fine.
Price: $18,000.00
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
"[T]he link between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, the bridge across which Victorian fiction stepped over into modernism." — Michael Gorra
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY is among the most important 19th-century novels to lay the groundwork for the stream-of-consciousness approach of the great 20th-century modernists like Virginia Woolf. James describes the struggles of his American ex-pat heroine in Europe with all the tenderness and nuance of psychological realism: Isabel Archer's vivid interior world shapes the narrative and creates a "richly suggestive picture of what it is to be an American" (Gorra). Bound in striking period style by leading contemporary bookbinder Trevor Lloyd, MBE, one of just 750 copies of the first edition. A beautiful copy of this pioneering work, a key link in the development of the novel from realism to modernism.
Read more: Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece; Isaac, 'Making Good': An Interview With Trevor Lloyd, BOOKBINDER, Vol. 17.
The Object
First printings. London: Macmillan and Co, 1881. Three volumes, 7.25'' x 4.75'' each. Modern gilt-stamped half brown morocco with marbled boards, raised bands, gilt-stamped spine. Top edges gilt, other edges uncut. Marbled endpapers. With all half titles. 266; 253, [1]; 248 pages, followed by 24-page publisher's catalogue in Vol. III, dated April 1881. Light marginal browning. Fresh.
The Fine Print
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