Henry James as Adapter: "The Portrait of a Lady" and "Can You Forgive Her"

Abstract

Henry James argues at length in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady that the original inspiration for a literary work of art may be impossible to trace. That, however, has certainly not deterred critics from speculating on James's source for The Portrait of a Lady's heroine, Isabel Archer, and her dilemma. Some suggest that Isabel grew from real life models. Leon Edel traces Isabel to James's cousin, Mary (Minny) Temple; Ernest Sandeen argues that Isabel is partly Henry James himself. Others suggest literary sources. F.R. Leavis and Joseph Warren Beach have nominated George Eliot's Daniel Deronda; Oscar Cargill adds Eliot's Middlemarch and Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd to the list.1 The sensible conclusion to all of this speculation is that The Portrait of a Lady represents a synthesis of sources, and I would like to propose one additional source that has been overlooked in critical discussion to date Anthony Trollope's novel, Can You Forgive Her. Though the field is crowded already, I believe that this is an important oversight. We can learn one sort of thing by speculating on James's use of real life, another by the way that he adapts polished works of literary art. But I think that we can appreciate James's sophistication as a craftsman and as an observer of the human heart perhaps most clearly of all by considering the uses that he makes of Trollope's flawed novel. James reviewed Can You Forgive Her in The Nation in 1865, fifteen years before The Portrait of a Lady began appearing serially in 1880, and Trollope's work appears to have stayed in his memory, for abundant parallels in situation and character exist in the two