Close reading

I'm Thomas Jones.

And today, for the fifth of our Close Readings summer travel specials, we have an episode from Novel Approaches with Colm Tóibín and Deborah Friedell talking to me about The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.

Um, to introduce it, I'm joined now by Deborah to talk a bit about James' Americans abroad in Europe.

Hello, Deborah.

Possession functions as a romantic quest in which two academics, a male and female, seek to uncover a hidden romance between two fictional Victorian poets.

Through close reading, digging through the archive, and general detective work, their developing romantic relationship is paralleled in the developing romantic relationship between the two Victorian poets.

They are called, uh, Randolph Henry Ash, probably modeled a bit on Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth, and Christabel LaMotte, uh, probably modeled on Christina Rossetti.

Not only do we get the modern-day romance and the Victorian-era romance, this book also treats the reader to a host of found documents, such as the fictional poems of the aforementioned poets, parodies of late '80s gender criticism, children's stories, and the romantic correspondence between Ash and Christabel, which John and I agree is the best part of the book.

As you might expect, this episode touches on capital R Romance and lowercase R romance, academic life, close reading, and the ever-elusive quality of middlebrow fiction.

Uh, and in this episode, I attempt to make the case this is of the more challenging sort.

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[laughs]