“James transfigured the novel form, or at least offered it the possibility to be something entirely new. If I were asked to identify the place where he effected this change, I should point to chapter 27 of The Portrait of a Lady—‘obviously the best thing in the book,’ in the author’s opinion— when one night Isabel Archer sits alone by the fireside in the palace in Rome where she lives with her husband, Gilbert Osmond, and contemplates the disaster that she, with the secret connivance of others, has made of her life. Here, in this chapter, as it navigates the stream of Isabel’s consciousness, was the “psychological novel” born. And here, too, was born the novel as an art form.”
– John Banville
