Her cousin Henry thought her the best, the brightest the most marvelous person in the world. He told his brother William that though he wasn’t in love with her, he truly loved her. William deemed her “bad” but later apologized for his ill feeling and believed, like his brother that Minnie was quite special after all.
HJ believed in the rights of women. He thought women of spirit were given short shrift, denied the right to sparkle and thwarted at every turn. He thought marriage a gamble, wanted nothing to do with it himself, thought for the most part, this pursuit lacked distinction.
Minnie also loved her dear cousin Harry, as he was then called, who understood ambiguity, word-play and gifts of the spirit. They spent a good deal of time together in Newport as teenagers and spoke the same language--that of artists. He hoped she would not be soldered to some dud who would keep her planted in the soil of mediocrity. They talked of going to Europe where girls of her ilk often ended up--there was no place for them in puritan New England society. Minnie abhorred hypocrisy, blandness and settling for less than was one’s due. She wanted to roam free and talk only of what was “true.”
Instead, she developed tuberculosis and at twenty-three a death sentence was the inevitable sounding. She wanted desperately to go to Europe with HJ who was now in England sure she would get well in the country of George Eliot whom she worshipped. She wrote HJ of her planned voyage and the fun they would have together in Rome; plans that never came to fruition. By age twenty-five she was in her grave.
HJ was beginning his artistic life--he visited George Eliot and eventually knew all the great writers of Europe but he carried Minnie’s spirit with him always and said that she was the template on which all of his female characters were built, and most especially, our heroine, Isabel Archer.
It was said that Isabel is a composite of Minnie and James himself. Isabel does seem to be a little more tempered with some of the writer’s seriousness. Minnie is also said to be the inspiration for the dying Milly Theale in “The Wings of a Dove” but we are only concerned here with Isabel who is assuredly not dying. In chapter LIII of TPOAL, Isabel who feels she is whirling in an abyss of death after all that has been revealed and her forlorn journey to England has a moment of inspiration on the train:
Deep in her soul--deeper than any appetite for renunciation--was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. And at moments there was something inspiring, almost enlivening, in the conviction. It was a proof of strength--it was proof she should some day be happy again. It couldn't be she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many things might happen to her yet. To live only to suffer--only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged--it seemed to her she was too valuable, to capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself.
To be sure, her wings have been clipped, she has been put in the cage by Osmond just as her cousin Ralph predicted. And that’s the point of my sequel to “The Portrait of a Lady;” to give Isabel back her wings and release her from the cage. That is, if she wants release--she did return to the Palazzo Roccanera and Osmond. Maybe she will grow to love her cage. Or her captor. Maybe the cage is only symbolic, unable to imprison a free-spirit, at least without her permission. We shall see.
"The Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art," by Lyndall Gordon, ISBN 0-393-04711-3, was used as a reference for this post.
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