Reading Henry James Changed My Life

I had an amazing senior year of college reading (and reveling in) George Eliot, Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Fitzgerald, and Henry James.

While all of them inspired me to be a better writer of fiction--my goal in life--it was James who was the catalyst for perhaps the deepest change.

I was reading The Portrait of a Lady--which many critics consider The Great American Novel--at 3 AM when I came to the famous Chapter 42.



(Nicole Kidman in Jane Campion's 1...