House-Minds and Houses of Fiction: Pedagogy and Author-Character-Reader Relations in The Portrait of a Lady Preface-Text Pairing

The Portrait of a Lady preface-text pairing, focusing on discourses of house-minds and houses of fiction, demonstrates that the preface and text productively illuminate each other in ways that enmasse approaches to the prefaces have not identified. This pedagogical feedback loop bridges the preface's depiction of the relationship between the older revising James and younger writing James with the novel's depiction of Isabel's relationships, assisting readers negotiating the novel's narrative technique (internal focalization) and interpretive crux (evaluating Isabel's decision to return to Rome) and the preface's representation of the revision process and the politics of James's identification with his protagonist.