The Portrait of a Lady (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Henry James and Gabriel Brownstein

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. Widely regarded as Henry James’s greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the author’s most magnificent heroines: Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe.

As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabel’s life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences.

Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old.

Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of stories—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W—which won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader,Scribner’s British Writers, and on Nerve.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432949

Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916) was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and non-fiction. He spent most of his life in Europe, and much of his work regards the interactions and complexities between American and European characters. Among his works in this vein are The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Ambassadors (1903). Through his influence, James ushered in the era of American realism in literature. In his lifetime he wrote 12 plays, 112 short stories, 20 novels, and many travel and critical works. He was nominated three times for the Noble Prize in Literature.

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INTRODUCTION

After having been serialized simultaneously in Macmillan’s Monthly in England and the Atlantic Magazine in the United States, The Portrait of a Lady was published in 1881, when Henry James was thirty-eight years old. The novel marks something of a midpoint in James’s career, coming close on the heels of his first great success, Daisy Miller, and well before the architecturally intricate novels of his later years, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. If Daisy Miller was James’s first popular work, establishing his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, The Portrait of a Lady was, in the words of critic F. O. Matthiessen, his first unquestioned masterpiece (Henry James: The Major Phase, p. 153; see For Further Reading). The short, spare Daisy Miller introduced to a large audience James’s great theme, the conflict between American innocence and European sophistication, and also his great subject, the American girl abroad. She’s an American girl, sings out Daisy’s younger brother before Daisy makes her first appearance in a Swiss resort town. And Lydia Touchett, Isabel’s aunt, introduces Isabel to her Europeanized cousin Ralph as follows: She thinks she knows a great deal of [the world]—like most American girls; but like most American girls she’s ridiculously mistaken (p. 56). The Portrait of a Lady is an expansion and complication of the themes of the earlier book. If in Daisy Miller, James wrote, as Rebecca West famously put it, like a piper carefully playing out a tune, The Portrait of a Lady is a more orchestral piece. It’s nearly five times as long, with many more characters and scenes, and a plot of such complexity that it allows for many more dips and rises, harmonies, choruses, and movements. The book was revised by James for the 1906 New York edition of his complete works, and this is the version you hold in your hands.

The Portrait of a Lady is often discussed as a novel of manners, a sociological study of the contrasts in mores and styles of Americans and Europeans. It’s also described as a psychological novel, charting the complex interplay between the minds of its major characters and exploring relentlessly and finely the consciousness of its heroine, Isabel. But these characterizations, while not entirely mistaken, obscure a central characteristic of the novel: The Portrait of a Lady is a fairy tale, or as James put it in the 1906 preface, a fable (p. 13). With whatever authority he presents the psyches and social milieus of his Europeans and Americans and Europeanized Americans, and however carefully he observed the locales—and the authority and care are absolute—the project of The Portrait of a Lady is about as close to a work of social science as it is to a conventional potboiler. Americans and Europeans, in the novel, are types: As Leon Edel, James’s great biographer and critic, has it, In James’ fiction, Americans are often presented as if they still possess the innocence of Eden; and furthermore, it is striking how often the adjective ‘corrupt’ precedes the word ’Europe’ (article in Scribner’s American Writers, Vol. 2, pp. 320-323). As they appear in The Portrait of a Lady, these representatives of the old and new worlds are rendered vividly, and they may feel to the reader momentarily real, but in the end they are figures in a novelist’s dreams and meditations; they are as conceptual as they are concrete. Similarly, American girl is not a category of mind or state of consciousness; it is a kind of representational ideal. In the author’s terms, the phrase American girl is almost redundant. Both the words conjure innocence and (in their way) beauty. Both words also augur doom. If, as Edel argues, America is an Eden, then a fall will come, as surely as a girl will become a woman or die. The phrase American girl also carries with it a hint of contradiction, a fight between the two words: While an American is liberated, a girl is subject to all kinds of boundaries and limits. American girl, then, is a phrase that conjures a story, a cheerful two words that together gather storm clouds. American girls are doubly doomed among the limits of European society; an American girl going to Europe is a pure white lamb bound to be ruined.

The Portrait of a Lady bears the details and precision of psychological and social realism, but the novel is structured like a kind of old-fashioned legend. We have an ordinary girl, Isabel, who on venturing into Europe becomes a sort of princess, an heiress related to her uncle, the banker Daniel Touchett, who in his kindness, power, and benevolence is as good as a king. Once in this strange land, Isabel is wooed by two Princes Charming, paragons of American and British manhood: Caspar Goodwood, the inventor-athlete businessman, and Lord Warburton, the nobleman-politician-reformer. But she marries neither and is instead entranced by Madame Merle, a kind of witch—an evil sorceress of society and good manners—who marries her off to the sterile dilettante, as Ralph Touchett puts it, Gilbert Osmond, an ogre of high aesthetics, who in the end does not find Isabel’s beauty up to the mark. This story is beauty and the beast in its most primitive form: the princess enslaved by a monster. But the monster in The Portrait of a Lady is a monster of aesthetics; Osmond is a painter, a collector of fine things, a disparager of vulgarity. And Isabel is no ordinary beauty: She has beauty based in character, in potentiality, in innocence, and in liberty of mind—in her being an American and a girl. This novel is not just a beautiful story; it is a story about beauty, a story in which the destruction of beauty is threatened by beauty’s great admirer.

The book opens with a meditation on a kind of perfect scene, Ralph and Daniel Touchett, along with Lord Warburton, taking tea on the lawn of Gardencourt. The time of day is aestheticized, the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon, which the narrator tells us could be only an eternity of pleasure (p. 19). The house is aestheticized, even its brick face, with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of pictorial tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it (p. 20). Daniel Touchett, for his part, has an aesthetic passion for Gardencourt (p. 20), and even Touchett’s beautiful collie dog gets into the rapture, watching the master’s face almost as tenderly as the master took in the still more magisterial physiognomy of the house (p. 21). This sort of highly aestheticized contemplation and pictorial scene-setting is replete throughout the novel, notably at the introduction to Osmond’s villa in Florence, where the narrator describes a small group that might have been described by a painter as composing well (p. 241). The windows of Osmond’s place, we are told, are extremely architectural (p. 241). Osmond’s beard is cut in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and he is described as a gentleman who studied style (p. 243). Not only are the settings beautiful, but these beauties are contemplated by a narrator whose precision and delicacy and aesthetic passions are rivaled only by his characters’.

The book is a tour of lovely places—Gardencourt, Osmond’s villa, the ruins of Rome, the Vatican—but the central questions in The Portrait of a Lady revolve not around the beauty of settings or houses or art, but around the beauty of the subject of the portrait—our heroine, Isabel. She is beautiful, this is clear. Ralph Touchett’s first observation upon seeing her is that Isabel is unexpectedly pretty (p. 30), and Mrs. Touchett, upon determining that Isabel is one of her three nieces, asks, And are you the prettiest? (p. 40). The narrator, comparing Isabel to her more conventionally attractive older sister, makes the following observation: Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two, but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians (p. 48). Isabel’s beauty extends beyond prettiness; it is not vulgar; it is a thing of high taste. Daisy Miller, the flirt of James’s earlier novella, is pretty, but Isabel’s attractiveness is of a higher order. Daisy is a daisy, a pretty little wild flower, but Isabel is a bell, pure and ringing, and a source of art. (She is perhaps a belle, opposed to a bête.) Daisy is a Miller, but Isabel is nothing so plebeian. She is an Archer, like Diana, the huntress, goddess of the moon, sculpted in gold-shining brass by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, raising her foot and bow with such purity of motion that it is certain that she is not hunting swine. The novel assembles around her a variety of aesthetic types, exemplars and worshipers of beauty. And the question they ask, the question at the heart of the book, is a double one: How will this beauty achieve fruition?—how will it be rendered? how will it find expression? Ralph asks his mother, when she brings Isabel to Europe, What do you mean to do with her? (p. 55). Mrs. Touchett replies: Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico. I shall do absolutely nothing with her, and she herself will do everything she chooses. She gave me notice of that (p. 58).

Of course, the problem is that most everyone will see Isabel, in one way or other, as something to be collected or admired—more or less as a yard of calico, albeit an extraordinary one. Everyone in the novel is an aesthete, a collector or pursuer of beauty. Osmond and Madame Merle have beautiful collections of precious little objets d‘art; they are both curators of their own houses, though as artists they’re dilettantes, he a painter and she a pianist, neither of them terribly serious. (James, however, was very serious about his aesthetic choices; in the 1881 draft of the novel, he has Madame Merle playing Beethoven when Isabel first meets her; in the revision, it’s Chopin.) Daniel Touchett has Gardencourt, and Ralph and he have the paintings and rare books therein. Even Henrietta Stackpole, whom James in his 1906 preface deems perhaps a little too vulgar for the rest of the book, is a literary lady, a collector and renderer of scenes. Minor characters are abundantly aesthetic: The fey Edward Rosier is a great collector of bibelots, which he sells in order to get enough money to woo Pansy, Osmond’s daughter, a charmingly frightening little product of high aestheticism, devoted as she is to pleasing her father and perfecting the ceremony of tea. Even Warburton and Goodwood are pursuers of pulchritude and perfect order, but in their cases the beauty is Isabel, and unlike Rosier, they make no confusion between the pursuit of beautiful objects and of a beautiful girl. It is perhaps because they mean to do something with her—marry her—that Isabel rejects them. She must remain independent—that’s one of the great words to describe Isabel, and it is essential to Isabel’s beauty that she neither wants to be collected nor to collect. Her conception of beauty is ex periential, not material, as in her contemplation of Italy: a land in which a love of the beautiful might be comforted by endless knowledge (p. 238).

What will be done with Isabel? In this fable, the worst possible thing. She will fall prey to Osmond, the most horrible sort of collector and user of beautiful things—he marries her for her money and thinks she won’t clash too awfully with his decor. In her marriage to Osmond, the problem of beauty—what to do with it?—becomes urgent, or as the novelist, critic, and philosopher William Gass puts it, the moral problem ... merges with the esthetic (The Brutality of Good Intentions, p. 179). For Gass the answer to Ralph’s question—What do you mean to do with her?—is at the novel’s anti-utilitarian heart. In Gass’s eye, the book makes a moral point: We should not use people—beautiful or not—as if they were a yard of calico, and he quotes the second form of Kant’s moral imperative, which puts Mrs. Touchett’s words somewhat less euphoniously: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only (quoted in Gass, p. 178). But for me, these words from Kant don’t square so easily with the book. Isabel stands for humanity—the mass of it—about as well as she does for a yard of calico. She is not ordinary; if she were even an ordinary beauty like her sister, she would not be the lady chosen to sit for this portrait.

The beauty of Isabel is not just her prettiness; it’s a beauty to be captured in prose: a beauty of life and mind, an interesting beauty—and this is the novel’s aesthetic ideal. Osmond likes pretty things, sure, but he does not understand the sort of beauty embodied in Isabel—a beauty whose source is its abundant liveliness of mind. It may be that Isabel’s a genius, says her aunt Lydia. And Ralph goes further: ‘A character like that, he said to himself—a real little passionate force to see at play is the finest thing in nature. It’s finer than the finest work of art—than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral’ (p. 76). In its striving to capture Isabel’s wonder, her gorgeousness, the novel compares her to works of art of every kind. She hums like a smitten harp (p. 178); she talks, says Henrietta Stackpole, like the heroine of an immoral novel (p. 180). She is seemingly always placed among objects of beauty—the pictures at Gardencourt, the ruins of Rome —but the truth about Isabel’s beauty is that it is more human than artful; its throbbing humanity justifies its aesthetic wonder. As the narrator tells us, She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world (p. 49). She is, as Daniel Touchett considers her, young life; she is fresh and natural ... our rustling, quickly-moving, clear-voiced heroine (pp. 68-69). Her beauty competes with the beauty of art, yet it is supremely artless. We’re told that her nature has, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality (p. 67). It may be cultivated, but it springs up from the ground. A word James uses often in the beginning of the book is fertilised. Isabel is a natural. The first adjectives applied to her—they appear in the novel even before she does—are independent and interesting, and the two seem close to, if not exactly, interchangeable. In The Portrait of a Lady, that which is interesting is independent of social norms. This kind of beauty is, for James, essentially American. I’m very fond of my liberty, says Isabel when she shows up in England (p. 34). And later, the first time her Aunt Lydia rebukes her (though mildly) for her indiscretion, they have the following colloquy:

But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.

So as to do them? asked her aunt.

So as to choose, said Isabel (p. 81).

She is not her aunt’s yard of calico, she is not Kant’s humanity, she is not a Titian, and though she is a heroine of a novel, she is not conventionally so. Were she an ordinary heroine, Isabel surely would marry Lord Warburton, who, though psychologically interesting and in his manners and good humor a compelling representative of English aristocracy, is best understood as a sort of super-marriage-object out of Jane Austen—better than Messrs. Darcy and Knightley, just as handsome, just as manly, just as gentle, but with twice as much land. But she will not marry him.

[Lord Warburton] appeared to demand of her something that no one else, as it were, had presumed to do. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he rather invidiously lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist—murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own (p. 116).

The novel chooses Isabel as a model of beauty because she is not just beautiful, she is beautifully alive—beautifully her own self, beautifully an American and a girl. The words liberty and beauty echo the phrase American girl: If Isabel’s interest rests in her independence, her beauty resides in her liberty.

The marriage plot moves inexorably away from liberty. Marriage—any marriage—is a threat to liberty; it makes a girl into a lady. What makes Isabel’s marriage to Osmond so poignant is that it is a threat not only to her liberty, but also to her beauty—her marriage threatens to destroy the very attractiveness that marriage in a conventional novel confirms. Marriage to Osmond is a kind of anti-marriage; it shoves her value aside. He sees Isabel as a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects (p. 320); she figures for him as a stylish trinket, not as something alive. The horror becomes acute, as eventually she comes to regret her own liveliness. When she walks around Gardencourt in the book’s penultimate chapter the narrator tells us that she envied the security of valuable ‘pieces’ (p. 590); and before the courtship even begins, Osmond worries that she’s not quite up to snuff. He thinks Isabel a little too ready to laugh or to applaud, and he says that she has too much conversation. For Osmond, Isabel’s beauty is marred by her vitality, the young life, in Daniel Touchett’s phrase, that is the source of Isabel’s liberty, her interest, and her independence. One gets the impression that like the aesthetic vulgarians referred to early in the novel, he might have preferred her older sister Edith—provided that Edith were loaded with enough dollars and that her manners were good. Ralph’s phrase sterile dilettante is apt. Osmond is overly precious, aghast at life itself, but—and this is crucial—he is not unattractive, nor are his values unrelated to those at the heart of the novel. In the fable of The Portrait of a Lady, evil is not good’s opposite but its caricature.

Osmond is beautiful, and in a novel devoted to high aesthetics, he is a devoted connoisseur, and though fundamentally so he is not entirely despicable in his connoisseurship. Osmond is described as a lovely object when we meet him—he suggested, fine gold coin as he was, no stamp nor emblem of the common mintage that provides for general circulation; he was the elegant complicated medal struck off for a special occasion (p. 243)—and he is last seen carefully rendering a pretty thing, also a coin: A box of water-colours and fine brushes lay before him, and he had already transferred to a sheet of immaculate paper the delicate, finely-tinted disk (pp. 554-555). The import of the coins is obvious, and not just because Osmond likes Isabel’s money. Beauty is Osmond’s currency. It is the source of his values. He is greedy and venal—he would not be interested in Isabel if she were poor—but more than that, his nature is such that, in violation of Kant and Lydia Touchett, he puts beauty to use. Beauty is the source of his own self-worth and, to him, the worth of others. He must place Isabel among his collections. She is valuable, and her value improves his.

In this way, the conflict between Osmond’s connoisseurship and Isabel’s beauty spins the book’s hub. W. H. Aden famously described Shakespeare’s Othello as a conflict between a work of art, Othello, and a critic, lago. The horror of Shakespeare’s play, Auden argued, came in part from the audience’s sympathy with the scientific scrutiny of the critical lago; according to Auden, theatergoers in some sense are set against the beautiful art object embodied in the Moor, and the play thus engages its admirers in a work of art’s destruction. The Portrait of a Lady similarly sets a paragon of beauty against its wicked hangers-on, but criticism isn’t the embodiment of evil in James’s book. According to the narrator, Ralph Touchett is nothing if not critical (p. 355)—James borrows the very words that Iago uses to describe his villainous self—but in Ralph nothing if not critical is not at all bad. Ralph is one of the book’s beautiful souls. If he is critical, he is passionately so; he lives to admire Isabel. Evil—and it’s not too strong a word to describe the soul-killing Osmond—lies not in criticism, but in a particular kind of over-refinement, of lifeless aestheticism. Not all aesthetes are evil, just the sterile ones. Ned Rosier might be foolish, but he’s not wrong. Like Osmond, he is a collector of beautiful trinkets; but he is passionate about his bibelots and his enamel; furthermore, he knows their relative worth and sells all his pretty things when he falls in love. Osmond, on the other hand, is somewhat sexless—it is, he says, his ambition to be pope. He sets himself apart from life, up in his villa with his pretty things. And he is, in his cultivated fineness, a hell of a lot closer in sensibility to the Jamesian narrator than he is to lively, naive Isabel. Osmond is superfine, exquisite and selective in his choices, but in him, aesthetic superfineness is taken to a deadly extreme:

[Osmond] had consulted his taste in everything—his taste alone perhaps, as a sick man consciously incurable consults at last only his lawyer: that was what made him so different from every one else. Ralph had something of this same quality, this appearance of thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship; but in Ralph it was an anomaly, a kind of humorous excrescence, whereas in Mr. Osmond it was the keynote, and everything was in harmony with it (pp. 277-278).

The Portrait of a Lady argues, as though the argument needed to be made, that life is not a matter of connoisseurship. Osmond has it backward: Real connoiseurship is a matter of life.

In The Portrait of a Lady, beauty is a human quality, not an artistic one, and Isabel’s beauty lies in her consciousness—in her mentality—and not in her pictorial qualities. In his study of James’s 1906 revision of Portrait, F. O. Matthiessen notes that one of the words James characteristically knocked out was picturesque and one of the words he characteristically added was consciousness. The book is a struggle to capture Isabel’s beauty, and part of the novel’s genius is its portrayal of her attraction to Osmond. Her love of beauty draws her to him—also her innocence. She cannot conceive of the corruption of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond; she can never dream of the truth of their relationship; she can’t even allow herself to think that Osmond is interested in her money. Late in the novel, when Osmond’s corruption is revealed, his worldly, Europeanized sister, the Countess Gemini, is left fairly gape-mouthed by Isabel’s naivete. It’s also typical of Isabel’s unconventionality that she chooses Osmond, and not Goodwood or Lord Warbuton—it is an interesting, independent choice. But most of all, what Isabel sees in Osmond’s devotion to aesthetics is a way out of the conventions of life that will inevitably rob her of her independence and interest. If she marries and loves either Goodwood or Warburton, she will cease being an American girl and will become something more ordinary—the good wife of a good man. Life, her source of beauty, is also her enemy: Experience will rob her of her American innocence, and time will take her girlishness away. But in Osmond’s world of beauty, as Isabel initially conceives it, she hopes that she will transcend ordinariness and thereby preserve herself—or even improve herself, that her life will be enlarged by his appreciation of and devotion to beauty. Her image of the man, as she is falling for him, is described as follows:

The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts—what might she call them?—of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached today; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden (p. 294).

James began to write The Portrait of a Lady in Florence, and it’s almost as if, in the passage above, the heroine’s conception of Osmond squares less well with what we know about her lover than it does with what we see in the book’s own narrative consciousness: It’s as if Isabel Archer is falling in love with Henry James.

Her picture is mistaken. Osmond’s relation to object, subjects, contacts is not what Isabel supposes it to be; it is not Jamesian, it is something much worse. Osmond is, as Ralph says, the incarnation of taste (p. 362); he is, as he describes himself, the most fastidious ... gentleman living (p. 281). But fastidiousness and taste are not passion or joy, and, we are told, Osmond would never, in the concert of pleasure, touch the big drum by so much as a knuckle: he had a mortal dislike to the high, ragged note, to what he called random ravings (p. 321). This revulsion to the ragged note might be Jamesian, but Osmond’s fastidious palate rejects more than just strong flavors. His relation to fineness is negative, it is a revulsion to vulgarity, not an ecstasy in beauty. His aestheticism is anti-sensual and anti-romantic. He likes nice little things, but Osmond cannot stomach soul-moving art. His view of Saint Peter’s in Rome is telling: For Osmond the place was ugly to distress; the false colours, the sham splendour were like vulgar, bragging, lying talk (p. 323). He is almost allergic to liveliness, and what he sees as formal propriety is something akin to death—it is form without anything vital. The first judgment that he pronounces upon seeing Isabel is telling: The girl’s not disagreeable. And when Madame Merle asks if that’s all he can say about her, Osmond seems surprised: All? Isn’t it enough? Of how many people have you heard me say more? (p. 302). Not disagreeable is for Osmond high praise—it is the nicest thing he says about anyone or anything in the novel. This is super-fastidiousness: He finds everything disagreeable, everything vulgar; if it’s alive it might make a mess. Pleasure and feeling upset him—he would prefer a yard of fine calico to a pretty girl’s talk. James as a stylist is sometimes mocked—the double or triple negatives, the sentences busy with commas like a piece of fish with too many bones—but consider the concise exactitude with which he describes Osmond’s pleasure—is it even the right word?—at the prospect of marriage: Contentment, on his part, took no vulgar form; excitement, in the most self-conscious of men, was a kind of ecstasy of self-control (p. 367). Gilbert Osmond’s relation to experience and pleasure is the opposite of Isabel’s. If she wants to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world, he wants to be set apart from the world, in order that the world may better admire him for his own fineness. He is happy that Isabel consents to marry him, but that happiness is worldly and egomaniacal; it is, as the narrator describes it, the sense of success—the most agreeable emotion of the human heart;" and as this description of Osmond’s happiness continues, it appears that for him success is not human or active, not success in living or doing, but success as a thing would achieve it, as an object of art:

The desire to have something or other to show for his parts—to show somehow or other—had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on the conditions attached to any marked proof of rarity had affected him more and more as gross and detestable; like the swallowing of mugs of beer to advertise what one could stand. If an anonymous drawing on a museum wall had been conscious and watchful it might have known this peculiar pleasure of being at last and all of a sudden identified—as from the hand of a great master—by the so high and so unnoticed fact of style (p. 322).

So he hopes that marriage to Isabel will confirm his greatness in the world’s eyes, and it is this part of his character—his desire for the admiration of the world’s eyes—that is finally most offensive to Isabel, and most disappointing. She has imagined him as apart from the world, as living unconventionally in a sphere of pure beauty, but in the end it is revealed that he sees his beautiful manners and his beautiful collections—and she as the centerpiece in those collections—only as a means of gaining the admiration of that world from which he has set himself apart. Ralph, in reflection, expresses this damningly: [Osmond] always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.... Osmond lived exclusively for the world (p. 412). And Isabel, when she has lived with him some time, begins to learn the awful lesson about her husband and his code of living:

It implied a sovereign contempt for every one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied, and for everything in the world but half a dozen ideas of his own. That was very well; she would have gone with him even there a long distance; for he pointed out to her so much of the baseness and shabbiness of life, opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the depravity, the ignorance of mankind, that she had been properly impressed with the infinite vulgarity of things and of the virtue of keeping one’s self unspotted by it. But this base, ignoble world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for; one was to keep it for ever in one’s eye ... to extract from it some recognition of one’s own superiority (p.449).

Osmond’s conventionality—his worship of the world’s view of value, of the eyes of the mass of humanity—stands against all the things that make Isabel valuable, her independence, her interest ingness, her liberty, her individuality; those things that set her apart from the common lot and compile her American aristocracy. In the end, Osmond’s living for the world is not so much misanthropic as inhumane and reductive. As Isabel discovers, he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance (p. 447). For him, the only important things about a girl are her face and comportment. And maybe this is why Osmond is such an unsuccessful, sterile painter—he captures surfaces but not life.

Osmond represents, then, both the antithesis of the Jamesian sensibility and an extreme of its fineness. He is not so much driven to beauty as he is repulsed by the vulgar, and as Matthiessen has it, One of James’s most limiting weaknesses ... was dread of vulgarity (Henry James: The Major Phase, p. 175). The 1906 preface expresses this dread, and does so in a peculiar fashion, a dread of writing in a vulgar way, and a grief at having had to do so. In the preface, James describes the composition of The Portrait of a Lady as something of a losing struggle against the forces of ordinary storytelling. When he calls his plot a fable, that’s not something he’s happy about, and he works hard to distinguish himself from mere fabulists who begin the conception of their novels with a sequence of actions; for him the germ of a novel is a contemplative vision of character. James blames his plot’s development largely on the anxiety of my provision for the reader’s amusement (p. 13)—he seems to wish for something finer than a plot, to wish that he had not had to put Isabel into a book. He blames this anxiety for leading him to the creation of Henrietta Stackpole, whose appearance in the novel James regrets. (Interestingly, all the characters in the book but one come to like Henrietta; only Osmond remains appalled by her vulgarity, and James seems to echo Osmond’s squeamishness.) Of course, James’s distrust of plot is not uncommon among novelists—one could argue that it is predominant among contemporary writers; All plots lead towards death is the refrain of Don Delillo’s White Noise, and in Grace Paley’s story A Conversation with My Father, the narrator talks about plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised—but for James plot equals not death or limits, but vulgarity. His squeamishness about telling a story, about sullying his perfect fiction with the commonness of a Henrietta Stackpole, is positively reminiscent of Osmond’s unwillingness to dirty himself with the ordinary business of life. In the preface, James famously describes how the book came to him with the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny (p. 9), and not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot,’ nefarious name (p. 4). He writes, almost wistfully of:

the image of the young feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at my disposal; but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact with the recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right. I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to realise, resigned to keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather than commit it, at no matter what price, to vulgar hands. For there are dealers in these forms and figures and treasures capable of that refinement (p. 9).

Here James almost suggests that composition of the novel might be a failure of refinement, and that it could have been somehow better to let the image of that young feminine nature hover before him, undisturbed, to do nothing with it, just as Lydia Touchett would do nothing with Isabel. Fortunately, James was not capable of such refinement, and he had to attach his fine vision to a roiling plot, barreling along, full of life, full of action and conflict, however vulgar.

So the novelist has a quick answer to Ralph Touchett’s question, What do you mean to do with her? And the answer is: Render her, create a portrait, write a book about her. In other words—in a faint contradiction of Kant—put the beautiful vision to use. But if a portrait of a beauty does put beauty to use, it does so only in the service of beauty and to create more beauty. For James, even that is done hesitantly and wistfully. The Refined Dealer in Forms and Figures must hand over his treasure to the vulgar hands of The Fabulist, but he does so reluctantly and with keen regret. According to Edel, The Portrait of a Lady was planned for almost a decade. And the book’s greatest achievement, both for James himself and for many of his many readers, is not any sequence of action or conversation, but Isabel’s extraordinary meditative vigil in the middle of the book, when she realizes Osmond’s relation with Madame Merle, and in a sense, when the story of her life is revealed to her. According to James: "It is a representation simply of her motionlessly seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere still lucidity of her act as ‘interesting’ as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate" (p. 17). But these contrasts—between motion lessness and motion, between still lucidity and plot, between seeing and doing—are not absolute or mutually exclusive. Motionless seeing can be exciting, like the surprise of a caravan. The seeming opposites are complementary in the composition of a novel. What do you do with beauty? You render it, but you do so with care and contemplation—you let it express itself and in doing so engage and expand it.

Isabel’s beauty is captured magnificently, and it is inseparable from the beauty of the book. In an era when writerly style still seems to be synonymous with Hemingway—show don’t tell, short simple sentences, avoid adjectives; that’s the advice you get in writing class—James’s style goes in for a beating. It is never colloquial. Too many people murmur vaguely, and even James’s greatest admirers make fun of locutions like hang fire. The general view of James’s disparagers was summed up by H. L. Mencken: Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyards (A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 500). But those words parody themselves; they don’t require response. James’s prose is not muscular; it is superfine. His words are chosen with mind-boggling precision. Rarely does James wax poetical—minimally or maximally; there’s nothing showy here. The narrative voice in The Portrait of a Lady is the voice of an artist, methodically and painstakingly composing the complexity of his portrait, each word a tiny careful brush stroke, and when as an observer you stand before the picture you are immediately taken under the sway of its subject. But bend forward, please, as you read, toward the canvas, and you will be dizzied by the perfect precision with which the sentences, the paragraphs, and the whole cohere in plot and contemplation to bring forth the liveliness and high aesthetics of Isabel and her portrait, this book. James may have felt uneasy about plot, but his devotion to the novel was absolute. And so this combination of committed storytelling and aestheticized meditation—James the Fabulist and James the Refined Dealer in Forms and Figures—combine to create a portrait that neither alone could achieve. As he remarks in the 1906 preface:

Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form—its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through all the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from woman to woman), but positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould (pp. 7-8).

Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W, which won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader, Nerve.com, and Scrib ner’s British Writers. He teaches writing at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

PREFACE¹

The Portrait of a Lady was, like Roderick Hudson, begun in Florence, during three months spent there in the spring of 1879.² Like Roderick and like The American, it had been designed for publication in The Atlantic Monthly, where it began to appear in 1880.³ It differed from its two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to month, in Macmillan’s Magazine ⁴ which was to be for me one of the last occasions of simultaneous serialisation in the two countries that the changing conditions of literary intercourse between England and the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long in writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice.⁵ I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight. But I recall vividly enough that the response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the wrong change.

There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry—all talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch of a call across the water—come in once more at the window, renewing one’s old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated mind. How can places that speak in general so to the imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much—more than, in the given case, one has use for; so that one finds one’s self working less congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice doesn’t borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by that enormously, but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be on it in her service alone. Such, and so rueful, are these reminiscences; though on the whole, no doubt, one’s book, and one’s literary effort at large, were to be the better for them. Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted effort of attention often prove. It all depends on how the attention has been cheated, has been squandered. There are high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking ones. And there is, I fear, even on the most designing artist’s part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious enough desire, to fail to guard him against their deceits.

Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a plot, nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements of a subject, certainly of a setting, were to need to be super-added. Quite as interesting as the young woman herself, at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the whole matter of the growth, in one’s imagination, of some such apology for a motive. These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business—of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages. I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff⁶ in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles,a saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.

To arrive at these things is to arrive at my ‘story,’ he said, "and that’s the way I look for it. The result is that I’m often accused of not having ‘story’ enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need—to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them—of which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d’architecture.b But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much—when there’s danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give—having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of one’s windblowngerms themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life—by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed—floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic’s quarrel, so often, with one’s subject, when he hasn’t the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it should properly have been?—his office being, essentially to point out. Il en serait bien embarrassé.c Ah, when he points out what I’ve done or failed to do with it, that’s another matter: there he’s on his ground. I give him up my ‘architecture,’ my distinguished friend concluded, as much as he will."

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilité.⁷ It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didn’t need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn’t depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believe—among novelists who have appeared to flourish—that offer the situation as indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russian’s testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly—if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one’s uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, of subject in the novel.

One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the immoral subject and the moral. Recognising so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all others—is it valid, in a word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct impression or perception of life?—I had found small edification, mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of ground and all definition of terms. The air of my earlier time shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that vanity—unless the difference to-day be just in one’s own final impatience, the lapse of one’s attention. There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the moral sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to grow with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience. By which, at the same time, of course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of the artist’s humanity—which gives the last touch to the worth of the work—is not a widely and wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and magnificent medium and on another a comparatively poor and ungenerous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form—its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through all the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may not open; fortunately by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the choice of subject; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the literary form; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has been conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his moral reference.

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward The Portrait, which was exactly my grasp of a single character—an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate—some fate or other; which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. If the apparition was still all to be placed how came it to be vivid?—since we puzzle such quantities out, mostly, just by the business of placing them. One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one’s imagination. One would describe then what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it had been able to take over (take over straight from life) such and such a constituted, animated figure or form. The figure has to that extent, as you see, been placed—placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an advance on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare little piece left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the speculative amateur, and which is already there to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a cupboard-door.

That may be, I recognise, a somewhat superfine analogy for the particular value I here speak of, the image of the young feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at my disposal; but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact—with the recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right. I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to realise, resigned to keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather than commit it, at no matter what price, to vulgar hands. For there are dealers in these forms and figures and treasures capable of that refinement. The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain young woman affronting ⁸ her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large building of The Portrait of a Lady. It came to be a square and spacious house—or has at least seemed so to me in this going over it again; but, such as it is, it had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. That is to me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of interest; for I have lost myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight personality, the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature an ado,d an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for—for positively organising an ado about Isabel Archer.

One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this extravagance; and with the effect precisely of recognising the charm of the problem. Challenge any such problem with any intelligence, and you immediately see how full it is of substance; the wonder being, all the while, as we look at the world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering. George Eliot⁹ has admirably noted it—In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection.¹⁰ In Romeo and Juliet Juliet has to be important, just as, in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver and Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth¹¹ have to be; with that much of firm ground, that much of bracing air, at the disposal all the while of their feet and their lungs. They are typical, none the less, of a class difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of interest; so difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance Dickens¹² and Walter Scott,¹³ as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as that of R. L. Stevenson,¹⁴ has preferred to leave the task unattempted. There are in fact writers as to whom we make out that their refuge from this is to assume it to be not worth their attempting; by which pusillanimity in truth their honour is scantly saved. It is never an attestation of a value, or even of our imperfect sense of one, it is never a tribute to any truth at all, that we shall represent that value badly. It never makes

Reviews for The Portrait of a Lady (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[knightlight777 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Hmmm, this is one of those classics you are supposed to read. Instead I listened to it. All twenty-three hours. One of those books you force yourself to finish, mainly because you started it. I found really not much of redeeming value in this long tiring portrayal of the miseries of the lovelorn. Isabella, and I strain to remember if that was her name the object of the tortures of committing her life to a man though she fought it pretty much every step of the way. Well more than this man as it turned out. In fact a number of them.And through the twists and turns a of a relatively mindless plot I was left hanging in suspense at the conclusion as I tried to decipher what every did happen to her. Was that just me? Maybe, but I also have to say it didn't really seem to matter that much.

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Miss Isabel Archer, a young lady from America, goes with her aunt to visit England and then the continent. She rejects two offers of marriage in the name of trying out a life of freedom, but then irrationally accepts a third offer, much less impressive than either of the previous ones, and things go downhill from there quite quickly.James is hit or miss for me; this one is a bit of both. For the first third of the novel I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was enjoying it, but the rest of the story was quite a slog, especially once James' trademark dreariness kicked in. I don't at all mind a sad story, but a dispassionately bleak one is certainly not my cuppa.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'd heard mention of the main character, Isabel Archer over the years, and was delighted to finally get the chance to figure her out for myself and I will say, she was one complicated character. But then, they were all complicated characters. Early in the novel, Isabel, (an American) travels to Great Britain to stay with her aunt and cousin in the English countryside. Somehow, she manages to have not just one but two manic suitors, one of which followed her across the Atlantic to beg her to marry him. But Isabel has other ideas. And when she inherits a lot of money she decides to travel and play the field.In Italy, she meets Madame Merle, who becomes a close friend and in no time Isabel has another potential husband. Decisions decisions. I'll leave it there for the half dozen people left in the world who haven't already read the book. But why do these Victorian female characters always have so many men to choose from???A couple of words about point of view because in this novel it's important. James explores and makes evident several points of view and not everybody is who they seem to be. It's what makes this psychological novel so darn compelling. Honestly, I could barely put it down. The pacing is absolutely wonderful. And I really don't know if there is another more endearing character in literature than Ralph Touchette ( is that a play on words?). Or a more annoying character than Henrietta Stackpole (again with the name). But the language, the salubrious, evocative, beautiful, sometimes overbearing language. Oh my. Yes, it takes some getting used to but after fifty pages or so you're on your way.So much to ponder, a mystery to figure out although I admit I had it pegged from fairly early on, and the ever present question: what will Isabel do? Absolutely glorious.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Henry James pursuit of the exact meaning of his sentences does a great deal for his word count. None the less, he does convey nuanced communication. the portrayal of the principal character of this novel does leave me with a good deal of pity for the lot of even upper class women in the time period. Am I left with a number of clear and striking images from this effort? Sadly, not at this remove in time.

[tonifgmamtc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm sure this is one of those books that is supposed to be studied for greater meanings, but I didn't do that. I'm so aggravated at Isabel. She had so many people in her corner and still ends up with a POS man. I love her sweet cousin.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Portrait was the first James I read, many years ago, and I enjoyed it enough that I've read almost all the rest of his novels (Casamassima can wait until I have my eternal rest) and the best known stories. So, it did the trick there. On re-reading, I confess to being a bit disappointed. The first third (we meet Isabel) is perfectly charming; the middle third (Isabel meets Osmond) is kind of a mess; and the final third (we meet the 'real' Osmond) just brings home how nonsensical the middle third is. All of this is because of my love for the later James.

That love comes from his turn away from plot, towards interpretation: what interests him is watching his characters try to make sense of the world, including themselves and their own actions. In Portrait, we get only a tiny bit of that, and instead a whole lot of plot, which was never James' strong suit. This is all made terribly obvious by the statement and restatement, by narrator and characters, that these people don't know why they do what they do, and that nobody can find out. We do finally learn why Madame Merle acts as she does, but even then it's resolved at the level of plot--a character, one who otherwise gives no sign of intelligence whatsoever, just blurts it out.

All of what works here carries over into the later novels (problems of love, of pain, of loss, of confusion), but it's done with much more skill and craft and insight in the second half of James' career. It's also much harder to read, and I understand why people might rather stick with Portrait. And I'm going to read a book about this one, in the hope that it changes my mind.

But I have a hard time imagining that I'll pick this up for a third time.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of a young, orphaned woman, Isabel Archer who arrives in England with her aunt. She is 23 years of age and is filled with bright optimism and doesn't want to settle but desires freedom. Men fall for her and she refuses them. Isabel had no money but when she inherits a large sum that she had no idea was going to come her way, this changes everything. She is no longer free but burdened by the burden of this inheritance. She is taken in by some two ex patriots who have their eye on this fortune. The rest of the story is about the choices she made and will make and the effects it has on her. I loved the prose, the characters, and the themes.

[oacevedo-792047 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I did not enjoy The Portrait of a Lady, though I see its inherent worth as part of the Anglo-European canon of "classics". Henry James write compelling novels. I found Isabel Archer insufferable, although I did sympathize with her inevitable fate.

[rab1953-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alright, yes, this is slow-moving, detailed and introspective. Why does anyone read Henry James if that is not what they want?But in addition to those qualities, it has wit and social satire involving real characters trying to work out their lives. Does it have less comic activity than that other wordy nineteenth century writer and satirist, Charles Dickens? Yes, but in place of Dickens’ comic caricatures, we have real characters, even the women. With James, I feel that I am exploring the complex choices of a variety of women characters who could be dealing with equally difficult choices today (unlike the one-dimensional ideals of Dickens’ women). The specifics of their choices may be different from contemporary conditions, but I can imagine these characters as people wrestling with modern issues.The book looks at the unusual marriage choices of a number of women – Mrs. Touchett’s life separate from a husband she seems indifferent to; Mme Merle’s unhappy marriage which has left her in relative poverty, reliant on the generosity of friends; the Contessa’s sham of a marriage to a philandering man she despises; Henrietta’s unmarried relationship with her admiring Bantling, which she eventually transforms into a conventional marriage; and at the centre, Isobel’s initial choice to reject two attractive offers before finally accepting the worst of her options. The first part of the book is taken up with Isobel’s background and character, focusing on her independence and unconventionality. She is a clever and thoughtful young woman who does not want to be tied into the restricted domestic life of most of the women she knows. Her observations are often sharp and witty. Drawn to her ambition and independence, and at the suggestion of her cousin Ralph Touchett, Ralph’s father leaves her a large inheritance. In her naivety, or her attraction to an intelligent worldly woman, Isobel is drawn into the circle of the interesting Mme Merle as someone who seems to live a life outside of convention but still within respectable society. She is charmed by Mme Merle’s sophisticated friend Gilbert Osmond, and takes him at face value, although Mme Merle has manipulated the situation to marry Isobel to Gilbert so that he can take advantage of her money. It’s not really clear why she marries Osmond, although there is the pressure of convention, and it later appears that they deceived each other in their reliance on social conventions. Both put on their best appearances and fell for what they saw in the other.When Isobel realizes that Gilbert has no feelings for her and intends only to keep her, like his daughter, as an attractive and useful addition to his chilling collection of beautiful objects, she concludes that her only choice is to live up to the marriage vow she made and live with Gilbert in misery. This seems an odd conclusion given the many different models among her friends and her willingness to reject convention. Her generosity of spirit perhaps impels her to stay in order to support Gilbert’s daughter, and fighting convention all the time is a hard choice, particularly when the unconventional relationships of her friends appears problematic and unattractive. Perhaps this is why she finally needs the excuse of Ralph Touchett’s illness to break with Gilbert.The ending is, of course, ambiguous. After the very touching scene of Ralph’s death, Isobel returns to Rome, either to submit to Gilbert or to confront him. The strength of her connection to Ralph, and her rejection (again) of Caspar Goodwood’s demand that she go with him, lead me to believe that she is going to break finally with Gilbert. She is a strong figure, and she knows her mind. I take it that she will go her own way, as she always has, and accept the consequences.As always, a fascinating, fully absorbing study by Henry James that rewards readers who are looking for thoughtful social and psychological insight.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully thorough psychological novel, the thoroughness can drag at times.

[cecrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Isabel Archer refuses to follow a life that is too prescribed by classical romantic notions. She is determined to find and follow her own path, or remain unsatisfied. This characteristic rules her as a number of suitors make themselves known. The story is primarily about what leads to the choice she makes, and its repercussions. Several other characters are intriguing and their roles each become clear. I had trouble placing the relevancy of Henrietta's story; I believe it clarifies that James' message was not about refusing women the right to make independent choices, but about ensuring illusions are fully dispelled before a choice is made. I really enjoyed this novel for its being chock full of people who make sharp observations, if not always accurate. There is no comedy of misunderstandings here, only analysis that is either lacking or overdone. Henry James knows how to get inside characters' heads and make himself at home, offering strong, natural motives for actions and dialogue that is brilliant both for what is said and what is not. The ending is very satisfying and comes together beautifully. I'm open to reading more of James' novels, but I suspect this will remain my favourite.

[novelcommentary · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Took the month of February to read this classic, considered the finest of Henry James. I enjoyed his portrait of Isabel Archer, the representation of the American spirit and independence. Being the benefactor of her Aunt Lydia who decides to show her Europe, we too get to experience that genteel English countryside, the meeting of the the local gentry and understand her reluctance to accept marriage proposals from two would be suitors. Isabel's cousin, Ralph loves her also and wants her to experience all her adventures. He sets in motion a change in his dying father's will so that Isabel becomes a rich women. This seemingly noble gesture sets her up for tragedy as her innocence is manipulated and she finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage where she is but one of the possessions of a Mr. Gilbert Osgood. I have to say it helped me to see the IMDB website which showed the cast of characters used for the film production of this story. Think Nicole Kidman as Isabel and most especially John Malkovich for Osmond. though I haven't seen the movie I can certainly picture him as the intelligent yet mentally cruel husband that binds Isabel to her fate. "It was because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put forth. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now—she saw the whole man. She had kept still, as it were, so that he should have a free field, and yet in spite of this she had mistaken a part for the whole” Though it takes awhile to develop the characters the ladder part of the novel produces some good plot development .

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The first book of Henry James that I have enjoyed. A wonderful picture of the life of Americans of unearned incomes in Europe in the Victorian era.Read Samoa Dec 2003

[baswood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

American Henry James thought long and hard before putting pen to paper to write The Portrait of a Lady. He was determined to answer his critics by producing a literary masterpiece. He likened his process of writing this novel to the erection of a particularly fine building: a classical building of course. In his preface to the novel James was at pains to point out this process:“So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical rigour. I now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence for erecting on a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally speaking a literary monument…………That solicitude was to be accordingly expressed in the artful patience with which as I have said I piled brick upon brick. The bricks for the whole counting over - putting for bricks little touches and inventions and enhancements by the way - affect me in truths well nigh innumerable and as ever so scrupulously fitted together and packed in.”This extraordinary preface prepares the reader for the long haul, but it also confidently claims that the reader will be in the safe hands of a master craftsman and storyteller, one who is blessed with a gift that can reveal aspects of the human condition to the patient reader. Patience is perhaps the supreme virtue for Henry James as the last sentence of this monument of a novel is:“She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.”Patience is what a modern reader will need for the first three quarters of this novel, but as Henry James says it will have it’s rewards. He moves his readers crablike through the first chapters where he introduces some of the main characters and sets them in a beautiful old Country House in England. His writing is delicate and fine and when we meet his central character: Miss Isabel Archer we are soon lost in admiration for her independence and wit, expressed in some splendid conversation exchanges with her hosts at Gardencourt. Miss Archer is a young American lady of exceptional talent who values her independence above all things and one can’t help feeling that Henry James imbued much of his own character in the portrait of this lady. Fine, splendid, delicate are words that we could use to describe the society that James is portraying here. These are people with independent incomes living in mid nineteenth century England, who have impeccable manners and who can call on titled individuals as their friends. Miss Archer from America can fit into this society through her intelligence and wit and because of her good American breeding. This book is about upstairs people, nobody from downstairs gets a look in.The story line of the novel follows the career of Miss Archer. She dazzles almost everybody she meets. She has offers of marriage from Lord Warburton a fine Englishman with radical ideas who is forging a career as a diplomat and also from Casper Goodwood a leading American industrialist. She rejects them both in pursuit of something finer for herself. When her protector old Mr Touchett dies, on the advice of his invalid son Ralph he leaves Miss Archer a fortune and so suddenly she is even more attractive on the marriage market. She travels to the Italian home of Mrs Touchett, where under guidance from Madame Merle she meets Gilbert Osmond, the embodiment of fine taste and culture. After a courtship she decides to accept Gilbert Osmond waiving away Lord Warburton and Casper Goodwood who have followed her to Italy. Osmond has been married before and has a young daughter Pansy who has just left the convent to live with him and his new wife. It doesn't work well for Isabel Archer, who after the first year of marriage becomes estranged from her traditionalist husband, but she soon grows to love his young daughter. It is Pansy’s prospects on the marriage market that bring Isabel Archer’s big mistake to a head and the novel’s main theme then becomes how Isabel can come to terms with her future.The novel was originally serialised in Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan’s magazine before being released as a novel a year later in 1881. The novel gains both power and depth as you read through; the almost painstaking preparatory work in the first sections of the novel reap rewards once the story starts to unfold. It is the quality of James’s writing that kept me reading; his descriptions, conversations and character building are first class and once the story gets rolling the groundwork provides an excellent reference for the characters and their actions. Henry James valued his own independence and so one feels he is speaking from the heart when he is describing Isabel Archers point of view. He never married himself and it is therefore no surprise to learn of Isabel Archer’s mistake once she falls into that trap. There may be some evidence for thinking that the author of The portrait of a lady was a misogynist. For example his heroine for all her intelligence, manners and charm has an inherent character fault: it is her pride that in the end leads her into a miserable existence. Most of the other female characters are shown as manipulative and uncaring or dull and it is only the young virginal Pansy that can claim to be good. By contrast there are plenty of good and upstanding male characters; Lord Warburton, Casper Goodwood, Ralph and old Mr Touchett, although the most evil characterisation is reserved for Gilbert Osmond.This is a slow moving novel whose storyline can be pretty well predicted, but this is not why we read Henry James. We read him for his characterisation, his brilliant descriptions and his observations on the human condition as well as his skill as a novel writer. There is no evidence of his rather mannered and tortured sentence structures that he favoured in his later novels. An added bonus for readers today is the depiction of life in mid nineteenth century England, even if it is reserved for the top tier of society. Yes James can sound snobbish and a little prissy at times and this in the end makes me think that his excellent novel is not a great novel. 4.5 stars

[dragon178 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have just finished reading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I had read it about 8 years back, and in this my second reading, I am as much affected by the beauty of the writing and the charm of the protagonist, as I was then. This novel is about a young and attractive American whose life takes an unexpected turn when her Aunt decides to' bring her out'' in England. Isabel is young and idealistic, with all the exuberance and vitality of youth. She bubbles with optimism, and lays stake to a higher moral ground. At the same time, she has that sense of infallibility and invulnerability that only youth enjoys.The novel shows her growth from youth to adulthood. On this road of life, Isabel's ideals and ideas collide with the reality of life. A higher moral consciousness is not enough to stop one from making wrong decisions because of poor judgement.Though she hangs on to her ideals, the world is not what she expected it to be, and she suffers" the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune".. She suffers the pain of realising that God is not in His heaven, and all is not right with the world. Early in the book, with all the nonchalance and insouscance of the young, she has blithely declared that people suffer too easily. She has to eat her words in the course of the story.Well, that is what growing up is about. When we realise that we too are of the common mould, and not special enough to be protected from suffering or martyrdom. I read somewhere that Isabel is one of the great fictional heroines of classical literature, belonging to the category of Elizebeth Bennett and Jane Eyre. But whereas their romances end with a happy ever after touch, Isabel's is ambiguous. She is not of the Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary variety, those bored housewives who seek excitement in extra marital affairs that eventually lead to their downfall. Isabel is made of sterner metal, and she lives up to the homily that with great freedom comes great responsibility.I recommend this book to every reader.

[jillrhudy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Give the book its deserved five stars, but Isabel is boring. In fact, everybody in the book is boring except Ralph. Isabel and Ralph are the yin and yang of good and truth; Merle and Osmond the yin and yang of evil and deception. And who cares about little Pansy? She is simply the vapid cement bonding together the evil duo, as the blood tie bonds together the hero and heroine.

James mercifully kills off the narrative ten pages after Ralph's demise, as if he knows who the main character really is. The best part of the whole book is when Ralph calls Osmond a "sterile dillettante." You go, Ralph.

James rewards the reader's perserverance with plenty of depth. The novel is a psychological gold mine. It's only flaws are:

1. a superfluity of suitors. There is a veritable swarm of them. They come out of the woodwork; lurk in every bush. The women in the book can't sit down in the park without lighting on a hopeless suitor. It gets really old.

2. a gross, unforgiveable scarcity of Ralph.

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read much Henry James before (I might possible have read The Europeans previously but I couldn't swear to it, and to be honest if The Portrait of a Lady is representative then I'm not sure if I'm going to be reading much in the future. I had great difficulty maintaining any interest at all in any of the characters, even in the heroine Isabel Archer (who is supposedly a remarkable woman) and I couldn't get a sense that the characters could ever have been real people. Isabel Archer is a young American woman who is invited by her aunt to spend some time with her in Europe. Mrs Touchett has her permanent home in Florence, only visiting her husband at his house of Gardencourt, overlooking the Thames Valley in England, for a month or so each year. But it is to Gardencourt that she initially takes Isabel, to meet her husband and her invalid son Ralph. Appreciating Isabel's determination that she must do something with her life, which has caused her to reject two offers of marriage during her stay in England, he is instrumental in obtaining for her the legacy which allows her to pursue the true freedom that she craves. But Isabel's new independence takes her to Paris, Florence and Rome the freedom which she craves remains elusive...To be honest I've never come across an account of the grand European tour that has just come across as so boring! The lives that are being led just seem so stultifyingly dull. I had hoped that when the novel reached Florence it would catch my attention as I've spent a lot of time there in the past, but no! According to the blurb on the back this is 'one of the finest novels in the English language' but do fine novels have to be so dull? It's not just that nothing seems to happen for long stretches, that I can cope with, but I can't cope with the artificiality of the characters.I'm giving this three stars because it seems too well written to give it less but I can't say that I enjoyed it.

[epictale · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book took me about two months to read! I read it at my son's urging. Happily, in the end, I thought it was worthwhile. I enjoyed a number of good moments and, in comparison to other "epics" (e.g. "One Hundred Years of Solitude") which I have recently tackled, the gain was worth the pain. It was quite a story! I really enjoyed the way in which James sketched the characters in terms of their motives and attitudes within the context of societal norms (both prevalent and evolving). It was too bad that the goodies were buried in tons of 19C bloated verbiage and, surely, hundreds of impossibly long (and yet so exquisitely constructed) paragraphs, And despite all of the palpable passion, the total absence of steamy sex scenes was a bitter pill to swallow. Throw us a bone, Henry James! In sum,however, the book was worth reading, and parts of the story are bound to stick with me. As an aside: I am looking forward to renting the movie version (1996) of the novel, in which Nicole Kidman plays Isabel. (Sadly, the preview looks awful!) I hope the protagonists -- for their own sake and that of the novel's dramatic integrity as a 20C interpretation --- will share at least a few moments of lust. Because that's what most people are and do. But my expectations are low.

[x_hoxha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mind which edition you're reading; the earlier one, published in the 1880's, is very different from the final one.

[lawrenh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My first thought was along the lines of "Alright, but Jane Austen did it better," and then halfway through my esteem somewhat increased as I began to hear the music of James' prose. I see now the roots of elements I enjoy in William Gass' work and understand why he holds James in such esteem, but I still think Austen did it better. Also, Pansy and her father, EVEN as characters, just plain CREEPED me out.

[jhudsui_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure why I ended up taking this book out of the pile my mom was throwing out. At the time I either thought it was important? Or I thought that she really liked it and wanted to read it because of that? I talked to her about it later and it turns out she was pretty indifferent to it, and so was I. Parts of it were well written, and I liked the ending, but 600 pages is way too long to spend on how little happens in this novel (three marriage proposals and one entirely unshocking plot twist, which is visible from miles away). Unlike Madame Bovary there was a point to the fact that nothing interesting happens; the author gives every impression of the belief that he's telling a legitimate story.

[leandra53 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dieses Buch habe ich förmlich verschlungen, so sehr war ich fasziniert von der Geschichte, vor allem aber von der ungeheuren Treffsicherheit in den Formulierungen des Autors. Die Beschreibungen der Charaktere und die herrlichen Dialoge sind voll sanfter Ironie. Dabei befasst sich James intensiv mit der Weltsicht und der inneren Motivation seiner Figuren und lässt sie für den Leser lebendig werden. Besnders gelungen ist für mich die Figur des Gilbert Osmond, dessen herablassende Arroganz und Selbstgefälligkeit mir bei manchen Dialogen (mit seiner Frau) kalte Schauer über den Rücken gejagt hat. Mag die Welt, die Henry James beschreibt, uns zwar heute fremd sein, aber sein Schreibstil ist für mich sehr modern!

[linda.lappin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An exquisite and timeless study of an American archetype. A woman undone by a foreign environment, victim of other people's treachery and of her own gullible nature. Hmmm, am I talking about myself? This book most certainly influenced my own writing.

[paulagraph · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, now I've done that, read a long novel by Henry James. There were pleasures, but also annoyances in doing so (for example, almost everyone is designated as "poor" so & so, which really got on my nerves). In comparison to, say, George Eliot's Middlemarch, the characters here are less mulitdimensional. James famously dissects motives & character, but to what end? Except for Lord Warburton, the characters are all expatriate Americans,almost all apparently corrupted by long contact with Europe. The staunchest exemplars of the American "character," the journalist & America booster Harriet Stackpole & the American businessman, Caspar Goodwood, are hardly more likeable than the rest of the bunch. One is supposed, I imagine, to root for the "heroine" Isabel Archer in her attempt to learn all about life while maintaining "pure" motives & accepting the consequences of her own (bad) decisions. But even those who seem to wish her well (want the best for her) such as Goodwood, Stackpole & Isabel's cousin Ralph Touchett, nonetheless seem to see her more as an object of their own imaginations than as a real person. Manipulation of others to meet some desire of one's own imagination, to make of that other one's creature, so to speak, seems to be a major concern here. James is concerned with individual identity & freedom but not so much its social context, except where social means another individual's will. Oh yes, of course, money is a play maker as well. I kept trying to read a broader commentary on America versus Europe into the novel & I think it's there, with no compliments to either.

[vonze-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What started as a Goodreads Group read, turned out to be a massive undertaking for me. A few years ago I made a resolution to finish everything I started reading...and out of all the books I've read since then, none of them came as close to forcing me to break that resolution as "The Portrait of a Lady". Tried to finish it, sat it back down several times. It's not a bad book, Henry James, the man can write...and I think that was one of the problems I had in finishing it...Henry James loves his vivid descriptions. So much so, at times, I would forget what was happening with the plot, he'd just go on and on, and not get to the point quickly enough for me. In other words, this would be the type of book I'd like to have on a desert island, if I had all the time in the world to enjoy reading all his extra little details. But with a busy life and a 2000-generation attention span, I had to set this one aside several times.

As for the plot, when you get down to it, lots of drama and secrets. However, I was really disappointed in the abrupt ending. Isabel Archer starts out as a young, wannabe-independent American woman, who happens to visit some wealthy family in Europe. After she is left an inheritance that could make her independence dreams come true, she is tricked into marrying a man with his own schemes. Based on her character's previous actions I really thought the story was building up to her leaving her husband or remaining married in name only and living as an independent woman (hey, it was her money), but I was wrong. I wouldn't feel so bad about being wrong if Henry James had used one of his vivid descriptions to explain what was going on in Isabel's mind, so I could have understood her decision.

[annesteph · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story. James captures most women at some time in their lives. I read this in college years and years ago. Never warmed much to the movies, but ate this book up. Henry James-the novelist who wrote like a psychologist. His brother, William James, the psychologist who wrote like a novelist. I always think of this statement that my history teacher, Dr. Wingo, from college used to quote.

[amelish · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dear god, the last three pages!!! More than make up for the rest of it. No, make the rest of it worthwhile. No, are something completely different. No, are the natural result of what came before.

The introduction makes some confusing points, I think, including the assertion that it's very American to think in "types" of people. What, archetypes? Stereotypes? Musical theater? Hollywood? Flesh it out further, please.

Finally, despite Jane Campion's tendency towards emphasizing the sexy, I can't believe she cast John Malkovich as Gilbert Osmond. The whole point is that Osmond is cold, fastidious(ly evil!), controlling, withholding, etc. and I really don't see JM as any of those. If anything, he projects overbearing sexual creepiness and belongs instead in Les Liasons Dangereuses (not an arbitrary comparison).

Wait, he *did* play Valmont (Dangerous Liasons, 1988) and wore a wig in an Annie Lennox video. So where does that leave us?

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Portrait of a Lady dispelled for me the notion that Henry James wrote impenetrable, stuffy novels. Instead, this was a beautifully written series of character studies, full of an understated humor. Isabel Archer comes to England at the invitation of her aunt, to stay at Gardencourt, where she grows close to her uncle and her cousin, the kind and sickly Ralph. She's young and full of herself (really, she's wonderfully self-involved and in love with her own charms), but she's also determined to forge her own independent path, despite her lack of means and society's expectations. To that end, she turns down marriage proposals from eligible men and plans to travel with her aunt. This book is chock-a-block with great character studies. There's Henrietta, a brash, out-spoken young woman working as a journalist. She's a comic character, but James writes of her with open affection, despite the things she says. Then there's Madame Merle, a femme fatale as calculating as any found in a hardboiled crime novel, and the character you can't (and shouldn't) look away from. And, of course, Isabel, who acts erratically and is misled, but who longs so much for freedom, even as she's uncertain of what that would look like. So, once again, I read a Victorian novel, expecting it to be a slog and finding, instead, a page turner with delicious pacing.

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful Isabel Archer is an American woman who travels to Europe hoping to find adventure, excitement and live an unconventional life. She is pursued by many men for her beauty and charm, but she turns them all down wanting her life to be something bigger than settling for a typical marriage. But after inheriting a large fortune, she falls victim of a scheme by 2 American ex-patriates and marries one of them. The plot of the story seems pretty straightforward, but the motivations and personalities behind the characters are what make this book a real gem. As the title suggests, Isabel is depicted as a portrait and although her actions are described, it is not clear why she makes her choices in life. I read this book together with members of the Goodreads Victorians group and had a great many discussions over this novel. Definitely a controversial and interesting book.

I both listened and read this book. I started with an audio version narrated by Laural Merlington. If you have never heard Merlington's voice, it is beautiful - the type of voice that you hear when you are hold on the phone, or that announces messages - pure in quality and tone. But I found that a beautiful voice doesn't do the characters of this book justice. Everyone seemed very vanilla and almost sing songy. I switched to a different audio version read by Nadia May who has a much throatier and almost husky voice. Her nuances of the characters was much better. The reason I bring this up is that I didn't really like Isabel Archer until the second half of the book and I wonder if it was the narrator. She seemed flightly and superficial in the beginning and it wasn't until the end of the book that I appreciated her angst over the difficult choices in her life. Was it the narrator or the writing? Still not sure...

[caomhghin_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is Henry James’ first masterpiece so the language is much less baroque than some of his later novels. It is a simple story, a reworked myth, of a Cinderella who turns down both Prince Charming and Boots, but then tragically becomes the Princess and is trapped by the Good Fairy and the Wicked Fairy into marrying the evil prince. Of course it is a complex, fascinating and involving story but there is more about “happy ever after” time when marriage is the tragedy. On marriage we see the Touchetts at the beginning who have solved the ‘problem’ of marriage by distance. We see Osmond and Isabel towards the end – a marriage made on one side for money, and on the other…? Plus Pansy who is about to be a ‘child’ sacrifice for marriage. Of course James is subtle. This is such a crude way of exposing his workings. He teases out character, development and points of view. The plot is a structure on which to weave the moral situations we create for ourselves. He avoids clichés. We never see Osmond’s final proposal, Isabel’s acceptance or the early few years of their marriage. So we never see the period when Isabel believed she had made the right choice. She thinks she has found a worthy Prince Charming someone to whom her money and herself will add a lustre. She values her independence but she now wants to share it so that they can do great things together. While there is a wicked plot to entrap her, Isabel contributes to her own downfall. She, like the classic tragic figure, is flawed. From the beginning the reader is drawn to her. She is a wonderful person – we have to like her for the story to work and we do. We see the workings of her mind, her pride in herself, her feelings that she was special, that she had something to offer the world more than a ‘brilliant’ marriage. This is charming because it is apparently innocuous and innocent. She is young. The slight weaknesses of character and egotism she reveals are, in fact, trifling stuff in the face of her inherent goodness and charm. But it is enough to trap her. She is ‘created’ as a wealthy heiress by Ralph and Mrs Touchett but she regards her own wisdom on seeing into the heart of a character as superior to theirs precisely because they are spoilt by the world. Tragically for her she does not have the time, or perhaps the inclination, to learn wisdom until it is too late.The novel starts in paradise, in Eden. We meet Isabel on her first arrival in this magic landscape and we see the effect she has on the men around her. She has two proposals and we know of the third which is never voiced because Ralph never speaks of it. Later we see the rather effete if charming Rosier too. The only man we meet who is not stricken by her is Osmond. He evaluates her, he wants to possess her and her money but you see no effect on him. Chillingly you see him as the connoisseur, the collector, who can admire his fine pieces for their style, for their origins, for their display of his connoisseurship and taste, but does not love them. Compare this with Rosier who adores his collection but sacrifices it, in vain, for love.But Isabel has an effect on the women too. Henrietta is a staunch friend. Mrs Touchett brings her to England, Madame Merle is charmed which is one of the reasons we tend to give her the benefit of the doubt at first. She obviously admires Isabel disinterestedly before she can know that she is rich. The Contessa takes to her too and Pansy loves her. So Isabel is surrounded by love and admiration from men and women. It is no wonder if perhaps it turns her head a little. Goodwood – there’s a good solid name – reliable, determined, obsessed he finally offers Isabel a way out. His offer is a repeat of his earlier one and in the same place. Isabel has never quite treated Goodwood right. She leaves him on hold in London. She uses him to accompany Ralph back to England. Today the choice would be simpler – in this society it most certainly was not and James, in his inimitable way, has prepared the ground for us and Isabel. We have seen Madame Merle who chose this route and we now know the disaster that was her life. We have seen the Contessa who chose another version of it and it is not edifying. She is an amusing, slight character, a flutterby but still unhappy. We have seen Mrs Touchett who neither touches nor is touched by anyone. Isabel feels for herself and for other people – she cannot blind herself to the situation. She can neither ignore nor pretend. Pansy is the child of evil (ie her parents are evil) but is pure good and love herself and she will suffer for it. Is she a sign that something good will come out of Isabel’s return? One doubts it. The horror of Pansy is that she shows us what Osmond wanted to do with Isabel. Evil not only begot her but is also moulding her to its own ends. Because although she has her own character it is so weak that we know being locked up in comfort in the convent is almost enough to blow her out, like a candle. But Isabel will survive. She will not be happy and her life will have been a ‘waste’ in her own eyes but she will remain true to herself.