Introduction

The publicity about what the New York Times recently dubbed “the James revival” has centered around Jane Campion’s film of The Portrait of a Lady with its screenplay by Laura Jones and starring performances by Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, and Barbara Hershey. Reactions to the film have been strong and diverse, from Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times to Robert Sklar in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In this issue, I have invited critics working in film, James, and narrative studies to share their responses to Campion’s Portrait. Like Campion’s own reading and rendering of The Portrait of a Lady, these critical responses encounter and offer differing narratives. They focus, variously, on the composition of “portrait,” the strictures of “lady,” and even—glossing problems of perspective and the gendered histories of cultural conventions—the structures of “the” and “a.” Reading the film as a meta-discourse on film and its history, a commentary on colonialism, a melodrama of female imprisonment, a meditation on the female body, a study of reproduction, and a (dated) manifesto for sexual liberation, Nancy Bentley, Alan Nadel, Virginia Wexman, Priscilla Walton, Karen Chandler, Dale Bauer, and Marc Bousquet trace the intersections of the 1881 and 1996 Portraits. Their essays on Isabel Archer’s stories offer stimulating variations on James’s own 1908 response to The Portrait of a Lady—a response itself appropriated (from George Eliot) and altered in its reproduction: “In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection.”—SMG