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[...] Only very late in the story, when she finally sheds tears for her dying cousin Ralph, can Isabel admit the folly his last illness brings home to her, seeing herself now not as subject but as object. For by this time she herself has experienced at the hands of Gilbert Osmond whatit is to be us…

Osmond is precisely what James’s critics accused his creator of being — a sterile aesthete — and James was well aware that they shared some apparent characteristics, not least the passionate attachment to art. Hence his insistence that the novelist’s moral responsibility went with an acute sense of…

[...] James, like Turgenev, was attacked in his time for thematic triviality and moral indifference, especially when compared with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Zola. These writers, it was argued, were concerned with the major themes of politics, ethics and religion. ‘They discussed social reform, invol…

James’s invocation of Turgenev’s authority in all these matters is significant. The two men knew one another in their Paris years, and while the American novelist owed a greater technical debt to other writers, Turgenev’s artistic example was vital to him as a novelist who put art above polemics wi…

[...] Reading is, of course, a major motif in the book, which is appropriate in a story about interpretation and misinterpretation — about Isabel Archer’s failure to ‘read’ her situation correctly; but that is no excuse for us to imitate Isabel’s attempt to re-write reality to her liking. And if th…