How The Portrait of a Lady drew on Fathers and Sons
A documented line of influence: Henry James demonstrably engaged Ivan Turgenev’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev · 1862
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On The Portrait of a Lady’s page
- James's whole method here is Turgenev's: build the novel around one vividly seen, morally interesting person and let the plot gather around her
- In his own Preface, James names Turgenev's character-first technique as the seed that became Isabel Archer
- Fathers and Sons shows the approach in its Russian original — read it first and you see the engine James retooled for Isabel
On Fathers and Sons’s page
- James read his Turgenev to pieces and talked with him in Paris — and credited Turgenev's method as the genesis of The Portrait of a Lady
- Turgenev builds the novel around a single morally interesting figure; James borrowed that and made Isabel Archer the axis everything turns on
- Reviewers in 1881 caught it immediately, comparing the two writers head to head