The Portrait of a Lady
London: Macmillan and Co., 1881. Three octavo volumes, measuring 7.5 x 5 inches: iv, 268; iv, 256; iv, 248, [24]. Original dark blue bead-grain cloth, double-rule border and panel stamped in black and blind, spines lettered in gilt with gilt publisher’s device and decorative rules at top and bottom stamped in black, brown-coated endpapers. Twenty-four pages of publisher’s advertisements at rear of Volume III, dated “April 1881.” Light discoloration and bubbling to cloth, hinges cracked, expert repair to upper joints of Volumes I and III. Housed in a custom clamshell box.
First edition of Henry James’s most influential novel, in which a young American heiress confronts the limits of her seemingly ideal freedom. “Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.” Inspired by the heroines of George Eliot, James created in Isabel Archer a new kind of protagonist whose dramatic interest lies primarily in her interior life. The remarkable third chapter of Volume III (numbered Chapter 42 in later editions), in which Isabel sits alone by the dying fire, silently weighing the series of misapprehensions that led to her marriage, prefigures the stream-of-consciousness technique of modernists like Virginia Woolf: James himself observed that “it is obviously the best thing in the book.” Edel & Laurence note that most copies of the first impression, issued in November 1881, include publisher’s catalogues for December of that year, but that some copies, like this one, contain catalogues for April 1881, “probably inserted through error or through shortage at the bindery.” The light uniform wear to the upper boards is likely evidence of label removal, as often with this title, which was widely distributed to Victorian lending libraries upon publication. Edel & Laurence A16. A very good set indeed, one of only 750 copies, in the original publisher’s cloth.
Price: $38,000.00