Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady” started with an apparition of Isabel Archer; James watched to see what she’d do; he loved her meditative vigil

In his Preface to the novel, Henry James describes the fiction writing process as starting with a “vision” or “apparition” of a character. (Most great novels do not start with a profound idea.) And what did the author say was “obviously the best thing in the book”?

From Author’s Preface

“I have always fondly remembered a remark…from the lips of Ivan Turgenev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began…almost always with the vision of some person…who hovered before him, soliciting him…If I watch them long enough…I see them…engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty…

“They are…in a manner prescribed and imposed…Thus I had my vivid individual…the apparition…

“The point is…that this single small cornerstone…a certain young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for…‘The Portrait of a Lady’…By what process…was the slight ‘personality’…to find itself endowed with the high attribute of a Subject?…

“ ‘Place [at] the centre [James said to himself] the young woman’s own consciousness’…

“And I cannot think of a more consistent application of that ideal unless it be…just beyond the middle of the book…my young woman’s extraordinary meditative vigil…It represents…one of the identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him; but it all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best thing in the book…” (1, Preface, pp. 5-16).

Comment

Where does the initial vision or apparition come from? By whom is it “prescribed and imposed”? There must be an intelligent consciousness in the author’s mind—an alternate personality; in antiquity, called “the muse”—of whom his regular personality had not been aware.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.