I don’t know what possessed me, but I ordered a copy of Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” from Amazon. I was duly punished. The book that arrived had this disclaimer on what would ordinarily be the copyright page: “Originally published in 1881, this work is in the public domain. No copyright claim is made with respect to public domain work.” Even worse: “This edition may reflect minor editorial revisions to the original text.” The book credited no publisher at all, nor even a printer. It soon became obvious why. 

It was impossible to read. In most books, the text usually takes up around four inches from left to right margins. This book’s content lay five inches wide, something my eyes couldn’t deal with, slipping off the line before I’d gotten to the end. And the left and right margins were so narrow that I had to break the spine of the book to be able to see the end of the lines on the left-hand page. 

So I went to our local bookstore and bought the version published by Penguin Classics in 2011. It has everything one might want in a master work, and more.

Instead of trying to convince you of the pleasures of this 623-page psychological, Victorian-style love story about a young American woman touring Europe, which are many, I’ll tell you about the extraordinary back matter by Henry James himself and by Philip Horne, a James scholar and editor. Following is just a taste of what the appendices offer.

First, an extract from the author’s notebooks in which he discusses with himself aspects of the novel and what his next steps must be. He writes: “After Isabel’s marriage there are five more instalments, and the success of the whole story greatly depends upon this portion being well conducted or not. Let me then make the most of it—let me imagine the best.” And he worries: “The weakness of the whole story is that it is too exclusively psychological—that it depends too little on incident; but the complete unfolding of the situation that is established by Isabel’s marriage may nonetheless be quite sufficiently dramatic.”

Appendix II is a preface to a 1908 New York edition, in which, among other details, James explains where his characters came from: 

I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them—of Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer’s history. I recognized them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my ‘plot.’ It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken….

In Appendix III, Philip Horne discusses the time scheme of the book: “James only fully dates one specific event in the novel, telling us in Ch. XXXVI that Ned Rosier arrives in Rome on 1 November 1876. From that date it is possible to reconstruct the chronology of the whole novel.” 

Appendix IV discusses revisions. The Penguin text that our bookstore sells uses the London edition of 1882 “in order to allow readers access to a younger James who was not yet…famous, or notorious, for the subtlety and complexity of his late style.” This section of the book lays out selections of the text from the early version alongside the revisions of 1908. It’s fascinating. Appendix IV is followed by a glossary of foreign words and phrases; and then there are Notes, which expand upon geography or reveal the sources or explanations of various references in the text.

This back matter will make you feel as if you’ve been gifted an advanced course in James literature. For more about Henry James, try Colm Toibin’s “The Master.” 

Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the “West Marin Review” and an avid reader who lives in Point Reyes Station.