The Portrait of a Lady

Edited by Michael Anesko

Ever since his works lapsed from copyright, much of Henry James’s fiction has been reprinted by trade and mass-market presses (though many titles have had irregular careers, inexplicably vanishing and then reappearing on publishers’ lists).  At present, at least a dozen paperback reprints of The Portrait of a Lady jostle one another for classroom adoption in American high schools and universities; the title can also be found in almost every bookstore in the country. Very seldom, however, have James’s texts been produced with a consistent editorial rationale.  In fact most of the reprints now available pay virtually no attention to the complicated textual history of James’s novel and thus deprive their readers of even a glancing awareness of it.  The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James will for the first time make all the fiction of this important author available in definitive, scholarly form.  Together with its companion web component, the Cambridge Edition of The Portrait of a Lady will allow students of James to compare all significant versions of his texts.  In the case of The Portrait, these number six: first British serial (Macmillan’s Magazine), first American serial (The Atlantic Monthly), first British edition (Macmillan 1881 [1882]), first American edition (Houghton, Mifflin [1881] 1882), first Collective Edition (Macmillan 1883), and the much later New York Edition (Scribner’s 1908).

Copy-text Rationale

 

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James will, as a general rule, adopt the text of the first published book edition of a work, unless the intrinsic particularities and the publishing history of that work require an alternative choice.  With respect to The Portrait of a Lady (and several other titles published simultaneously in Great Britain and the United States), the idiosyncracies of publishing history dictate that the choice of copy-text be the second published edition.

Like so many other Victorian triple-decker novels, The Portrait of a Lady first appeared in England as an expensive three-volume set, that being the preferred format for distribution through the influential private circulating libraries (most famously Mudies).  For decades, the standard price of the triple-decker was a guinea-and-a-half (31s.6d.)—relatively few copies being sold for individual purchase, almost all taken up by the network of subscription libraries.  Accordingly, Macmillan published James’s novel in three volumes early in November 1881, just as the story was concluding its run in the eponymous house monthly magazine.

As David J. Supino has explained in his Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921 (Liverpool University Press, 2006), Macmillan first set type for what would become the one-volume second edition of The Portrait of a Lady (not published until June 1882).  Moulds of this setting were made by the printers, from which two sets of stereotype plates were produced.  One set of plates was sent to Houghton, Mifflin in Boston for printing the first (one-volume) American edition, which became available on November 16, 1881, but with an 1882 date on the title-page.

Macmillan’s printers then redistributed the standing type, using blank lead spacers to expand the vertical alignment of text, making for a more handsome and readable page in the three-volume edition, but also introducing numerous errors in the process.  The first edition of the novel, then, was printed from this case of standing type and became available (according to printing records) on November 8, 1881.  In actuality, however, this “first” edition was the third book text and arguably the least reliable.

After allowing the more expensive triple-decker to have its run with the libraries, Macmillan published the second edition of the novel in one volume (priced at six shillings) in June 1882.  This second Macmillan edition has been adopted as copy-text for the Cambridge Edition of The Portrait of a Lady, as its setting of type has chronological priority over the others.

The Texts of  The Portrait of a Lady

On this website, viewers can access all six different versions of James’s novel.  The texts are unemended and unannotated: verbatim electronic transcriptions of the original printed sources, reflecting whatever errors of composition those sources inadvertently incorporated or introduced.

Any one who wants to compare James’s texts can now do so with the ease of word-processing software.

For more detailed analysis of textual issues and more extensive collation and discussion of textual variants, readers should consult the Cambridge Edition in its print form.  The Portrait of a Lady was issued in 2016.  Visitors to this site with questions or corrections to suggest will please contact the volume editor, Michael Anesko, whose name here will provide a link via electronic mail.

All electronic texts available on this website are © 2010 by Michael Anesko. All rights reserved.