“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 4) by Henry James: Editor-personality’s failure to control narrator-personality results in very long paragraphs

Chapter VI begins with a 1,000-word, two-and-a-half-page paragraph, the gist of which is as follows:

“Isabel Archer was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active…among her contemporaries she passed for a young woman of extraordinary profundity…she…had a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior…Meanwhile her errors and delusions were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his subject must shrink from specifying…the danger of a high spirit was the danger of inconsistency…she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant” (1, pp. 62-64).

Henry James’s overly-long sentences and paragraphs have been discussed for generations, and I want to add my two cents. What comes to mind is a comment by Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Toni Morrison, who had been an editor before she became a writer. She said that she could always tell when a character had gotten away from a writer. She saw characters as having minds of their own, and said it was the author’s responsibility to control them, to remind them who was boss, and whose novel it was.

It is not only character-personalities who have minds of their own; narrator-personalities do, too. And James’s long paragraphs look like the product of a narrator-personality who tends to go on and on, because it is just doing what it is specialized to do. And James’s editor-personality chooses not to control his narrator-personality, because he thinks that his narrator is not just verbose, but quite impressive. Or his narrator-personality refuses to be edited, and says, take it or leave it.

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