The Portrait of a Lady [Norton Critical Edition]

I both love and hate "The Portrait of a Lady." It's so incredibly *frustrating* that I find rereads quite painful--Isabel, why are you such an idiot? But when you consider how sexually repressed poor James reportedly was, the repression that underlies this novel becomes almost delicious in its intensity. You can't help feel for poor Ralph Touchett, walking around with his hands in his pockets, or even for idiot Isabel, finding nothing but terror in the climactic "white lightning" kiss. I appreciate this book more and more every time I go back to it, but afterwards I always need to read a lot of porn.

A Portrait of a Lady is in reality a portrait of 10 or 12 people. They are all so carefully drawn with their strengths and their foibles. Each of them seem to live compromised lives, lives compromised by their own limitations. It's all fabulously drawn so that reading it is almost like seeing each scene and being able to read each person's mind. It will be with me for a long time

This Norton Critical (ed 1975) is probably a bit dated in its supplemental content. The second edition (1995) – which drops the Graham Greene, Arnold Kettle, and Dorothea Krook essays – adds critical essays by William Veeder and Millicent Bell along with an additional article by Nina Baym on the textual variants between the 1881 and 1908 editions of the novel. Other than that, however, the two Norton Critical editions appear fairly similar in content.

Note that the Norton Critical is based on the 1908 edition of the novel but does include a substantial Textual Appendix of variations between the 1908 edition and the original 1881 text (the latter being the text used by the Library of America edition).

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