The Portrait of a Lady, one of the greatest novels in the English language, ends rather inconclusively. “I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation,” wrote Henry James in his notebooks. On the other hand, he added, the work “is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not, later.”
John Banville has now taken it up. Actually he’s mucked it up—but in ways that remind us why the original is so compelling. His sequel, Mrs. Osmond, offers the further adventures of Isabel Archer, her bumptious but lovable journalist friend Henrietta Stackpole, her rotten husband Gilbert Osmond, her cold Aunt Lydia, her wacky and dissolute sister-in-law, her former suitor Caspar Goodwood, and treacherous Madame Merle, the onetime mentor who manipulated and betrayed her.
Isabel Archer of Albany, New York, goes to Europe, inherits a small fortune, marries, and is “ground in the very mill of the conventional,” in James’s words. For many readers, the final pages of The Portrait of a Lady portend tragedy for the wife of despicable Gilbert Osmond. Banville has a better grasp of the trajectory of the work than that. The Irish novelist senses, to his credit, that whatever further scrapes Mrs. Osmond would get into—and this sequel has her getting into plenty—her story would be bound to conclude in an upbeat way. I don’t mean a tidy ending with “happily ever after” stamped on it, but affirmative in a higher sense. Surely that is what James wanted for Isabel, whom the critic F. O. Matthiessen called “a daughter of the transcendental afterglow, far less concerned about happiness than about enlightenment and freedom.” Banville has her reading Emerson, a very appropriate and Jamesian touch.
But now for the mucked-up part. Things get strange early on when Isabel careens around London with a large load of cash that she has withdrawn from her bank account, and then misplaces it. We knew her to be bold, and occasionally impulsive, but she was not an airhead. Sometimes this Isabel does resemble the gallant young woman we knew from the original novel, but she often shifts unaccountably to being someone who cringes before others’ disapproval. She spends a lot of time nearly fainting from the pollution in London and the heat in Florence. To top it off, Banville has her display contrition before the fortune-hunting husband who wronged her. It just isn’t Isabel-like.
We knew this heroine to be active and reflective by turns—philosophically minded but also self-critical, in full possession of what James called “the Puritan residuum.” Banville’s version of self-critical is irritating. He has Isabel take reckless or petty actions and afterwards feel a flash or two of regret. The original Isabel was the opposite of petty. She made missteps (if she hadn’t there would have been no plot), but her compunction always had a certain heft to it. Banville’s Isabel gives herself wan little pep talks and chides herself for even feeling compunction.
He reproduces rather well the narrative voice of the Master, at least in certain passages. This one is about Isabel and her stepdaughter:
It has the right ring, stylistically. But substantively it sets The Portrait of a Lady on its head. Isabel is motivated by spite here—again, most un-Isabel-like. Edmund Rosier, an American expatriate who collects objets d’art, is a milquetoast but James makes him a sympathetic character in that he retains his American sincerity. He pawns much of his collection so Gilbert Osmond will not think him a poor prospective son-in-law. Osmond ignores him, intending to find an aristocrat for Pansy to marry.
The Isabel of The Portrait of a Lady tried to wrest Pansy from the control of her despotic father and unite her with Rosier. The sequel, muddling the novel’s contrast between American virtue and European vice, strips Rosier of his redeeming qualities. Banville has decided to transform him into a mini-Osmond, a selfish and arrogant poseur who never would have made a good husband anyway. Isabel’s help—offered at the end of James’s tale as a self-sacrifice, since it alienated her husband from her—is no longer needed. Much less is it needed on Pansy’s end, since she has been transformed (by the convent to which she is sent by her father as punishment) into an incipient lesbian.
In order to stretch these characters across a century and a half, Banville makes some politically correct moves. Cynical Gilbert Osmond launches into a tirade on the evils of his native country that sounds as if it came from Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. The Henrietta Stackpole of Mrs. Osmond is a suffragist, as opposed to the forthright kind of American woman who, busily active in the world, is at the same time uninterested in direct political representation.
Fair enough, in both cases. These innovations don’t bend these two characters too far out of their original shapes. Bringing the main character up to date takes a much greater toll on the overall quality of the novel.
Isabel’s ditziness, the self-esteem pep talks she gives herself, even the way the plot maneuvers her out of a role of assistance to star-crossed young lovers—all of these things militate toward Isabel’s devoting herself not to persons but to a cause. That cause turns out to be the one that Henrietta Stackpole has gone in for: the vote. At novel’s end Isabel is in London, where Henrietta lives. Through her Isabel has met a British socialist and supporter of women’s rights who could use some seed money to start a radical newspaper. He sails soon for New York City, and Isabel is to go with him.
Freedom and dignity for the Isabel Archer Osmond created by Henry James lay in choosing to defend a good and weak person from a strong and bad one (her stepdaughter from her husband). Freedom and dignity for this Isabel lies in becoming the 19th-century fictional version of Katrina vanden Heuvel. Non sequitur.
Lauren Weiner is associate editor of Law and Liberty.
