[...] 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, involving themselves and their work in the great issues of the day, while Turgenev and James merely trifled wittily with the private lives of the upper classes in the Wildean manner. The accusation of triviality is palpable nonsense, and On The Eve, Fathers and Children, The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians are there to prove it — as is The Importance of Being Earnest for that matter. The charge of moral indifference is equally absurd, but James’s discussion of just this topic in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady is worth recalling, given its bearing on the story. The novelist, he tells us, is primarily an artist, not a moralist. This is no abnegation of his ethical responsibility. On the contrary, what James calls ‘the moral sense’ of a work of art therefore depends not upon the ‘dull dispute’ about subjects or the crude taking of sides which inevitably leads to melodrama or sentimentality, but on the artist’s ability to render life as faithfully as possible in all its subtlety and complexity. Art is indeed about life, but in order to appreciate that we must first grasp the fact that it is art and approach it accordingly. For as this novel’s title suggests, the relationship between art and life, and the ways in which art is a part of life and a medium through which we can understand and misunderstand it, appropriate and misappropriate it: these themes are of supreme importance for James, and nowhere more so than in The Portrait of a Lady, where we might argue that the heroine’s disastrous confusion of the aesthetic and the ethical constitutes the very basis of the plot when she mistakes Gilbert Osmond’s narcissistic aloofness for moral virtue.