From Daisy Miller to Isabel Archer to Maisie, female characters dominate the work of Henry James and, often, critical discussion of James's work. Donatella Izzo shifts that discussion to a
different, more revealing, plane in this original interpretation of James's short fiction. By redirecting criticism from a biographical emphasis to a focus on James's engagement with the
issues of representation, Izzo shows how these short stories actually question and investigate the cultural and ideological practices that produced women, both in literature and in
society. Portraying the Lady brings to light the experimental quality and inherent consistency of stories that have received little critical attention, all of which revolve around
ideas at the core of the cultural representation of femininity at the time. Izzo shows how James, by testing and stretching these ideas in his imagery and plots, exposed and exploded the
perverse logic and the ultimate implications of such culturally shared versions of femininity, thus revealing their oppressive quality for women and laying bare literature's complicity in
reproducing and circulating them. Exposing James's texts as sensitive registers of women's roles during the Victorian-Edwardian era, this book demonstrates that his texts make readers aware
of how those stereotypes operated. Blending literary, art, and feminist criticism with narratological analysis and postmodern theory, this groundbreaking work restores a formal awareness
to James studies within the wider theoretical concerns of feminist, gender, and cultural critiques.
