How to start: I was reading this book on the plane and my seat mate asked if it was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t, I said, and felt a little shy… Was this film some kind of adaptation, I wondered? It’s not. Most definitely not.
An excerpt:
Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years in travelling: after which he had found himself perched on a high stool in his father's bank. The responsibility and honour of such positions is not, I believe, measured by the height of the stool, which depends upon other considerations: Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of standing, and even of walking about, at his work. To this exercise, however, he was obliged to devote but a limited period, for at the end of some eighteen months he had become aware of his being seriously out of health. He had caught a violent cold, which fixed itself on his lungs and threw them into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply to the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At first he slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common. This person, however, improved on acquaintance, and Ralph grew at least to have a certain grudging tolerance, even an undemonstrative respect for him. Misfortune makes strange bedfellows, and our young man, feeling that he had something at stake in the matter - it usually struck him as his reputation for ordinary wit - devoted to his graceless charge an amount of attention of which note was duly taken and which had at least the effect of keeping the poor fellow alive. One of his lungs began to heal, the other promised to follow its example, and he was assured he might outweather a dozen winters if he would betake himself to those climates in which consumptives chiefly congregate. As he had grown extremely fond of London, he cursed the flatness of exile: but at the same time that he cursed he conformed, and gradually, when he found his sensitive organ grateful even for grim favours, he conferred them with a lighter hand. He wintered abroad as the phrase is; basked in the sun, stopped at home when the wind blew, went to bed when it rained, and once or twice when it had snowed overnight, almost never got up again. (p 51)
Tangential: Henry James’s biography on Britannica is fascinating… he met so many authors and travelled just as much as his characters do in this book.