The true meaning of being fashionably late in Henry James's late works.

The true meaning of being fashionably late in Henry James’s late works.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) 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 re-creating 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 Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and 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.

This study challenges the notion that closeted secrecy was a necessary part of social life for gay men living in the shadow of the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. It reconstructs a surprisingly open network of queer filiation in which Henry James occupied a central place. The lives of its satellite figures — most now forgotten or unknown — offer even more suggestive evidence of some of the countervailing forms of social practice that could survive even in that hostile era. If these men enjoyed such exemption largely because of the prerogatives of class privilege, their relative freedom was nevertheless a visible rebuke to the reductive stereotypes of homosexuality that circulated and were reinforced in the culture of the period. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of Henry James and queer studies, readers of late Victorian and modern literature, and those interested in the history and social construction of gender roles.

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

Often regarded as one of the most important literary figures of his era, American-born author Henry James possessed a unique knack for describing the idiosyncrasies of dysfunctional families. The Ambient family at the center of the novella The Author of Beltraffio ranks among his most compelling creations. The patriarch Mark Ambient is an acclaimed novelist whose wife strongly disapproves of his work. Will this discordance bring the family to its knees?

An exploration of the queer childhoods and odd careers of artists and writers of the 1890s and 1960s.

Prologue -- Becoming Henry James -- Global apprenticeship -- The James brand -- Professional author -- Masterpieces -- Epilogue.

Explores how the novels of Henry James reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society, and how essential the language and imagery of the arts, as well as friendships with artists, were to James's writing.