The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
"“Nothing but a laborious riddle,” The Spectator said, while The Nation remarked on its “elaborate placidity”; even William Dean Howells—not just James’s friend and adviser but the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had received it, chunk by chunk, for serial publication—was moved to ask, in an essay on James the following year, “Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story?” A furious but anonymous critic, in The Quarterly Review, cited Howells’s words and added, “The answer to this question, from nine readers out of ten, will be emphatically No.” To an extent, the battle over James has never really shifted from that ground; Jamesians continue to swoon over his fine discernment, while detractors still smirk at his willingness to grind near-nothings into powder."
Lane, Anthony. "Out of the Frame: A new portrait of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady." The New Yorker, September 3, 2012.
"“Nothing but a laborious riddle,” The Spectator said, while The Nation remarked on its “elaborate placidity”; even William Dean Howells—not just James’s friend and adviser but the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had received it, chunk by chunk, for serial publication—was moved to ask, in an essay on James the following year, “Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story?” A furious but anonymous critic, in The Quarterly Review, cited Howells’s words and added, “The answer to this question, from nine readers out of ten, will be emphatically No.” To an extent, the battle over James has never really shifted from that ground; Jamesians continue to swoon over his fine discernment, while detractors still smirk at his willingness to grind near-nothings into powder."
Lane, Anthony. "Out of the Frame: A new portrait of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady." The New Yorker, September 3, 2012.
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