Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

There are but seven essays here, from Richard Poirier's classic study of comedy in The Portrait to a previously unpublished piece by Deborah Esch. And are they really ``the best criticism yet devoted to Henry James's masterwork''? Individually, they lead us again and again to the question of marriage, toward which one's attitude, as James noted in a 1881 letter to Grace Norton (quoted here by Laurence Bedwell Holland), is ``the most characteristic part doubtless of one's general attitude toward life.'' This does not mean putting all of one's eggs into the matrimonial basket; to the contrary, says Nina Baym, ``the real possibilities of love and marriage are to be experienced only by those who do not depend on them to give life meaning,'' which is something Isabel Archer must learn the hard way. As a consequence, Archer exists somewhere between Jane Austen's heroines and more recent ones, and her story is a key work in the transition from the 18th-century novel to that of the 20th century. By raising the central issue of marriage in The Portrait in particular and its role in the development of fiction in general, editor Bloom's seven critics give us work that is very, very good, if not necessarily ``the best,'' and certainly the book as a whole is a worthy purchase for graduate libraries.-D. Kirby, Florida State University