- Mass Market Paperback: 656 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classic; Reprint edition (Jun 28 1984)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 014043223X
- ISBN-13: 978-0140432237
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 408 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,397,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.”—Rebecca West
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
"The Portrait of a Lady" is the most stunning achievement of Henry James's early period--in the 1860s and '70s when he was transforming himself from a talented young American into a resident of Europe, a citizen of the world, and one of the greatest novelists of modern times. A kind of delight at the success of this transformation informs every page of this masterpiece. Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence that is at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characters with whom she is entangled--the good man and the evil one, between whom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom she must do battle--are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggests dazzling imaginative powers. And the scene painting--in England and Italy--provides a continuous visual pleasure while always remaining crucial to the larger drama.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
female sovereigny versus marriage,
This review is from: The Portrait of a Lady (Hardcover)
"The Portrait of a Lady" was published in three volumes in 1881. The masterpiece of the first phase of James' career, the novel is a study of Isabel Archer, a young American woman of great promise who travels to Europe and becomes a victim of her own provincialism. James began the novel without a plot or subject, only the slim but provocative notion of a young woman taking control of her fate. The result is a richly imagined study of an American heiress who turns away her suitors in an effort to first establish and then protect her independence. Isabel Archer is a young woman who reads German idealist philosophy in the locked office at Albany that occludes a view of the street; an overly theoretic, though wonderfully fresh and earnest self-realizer. Unlike Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer is booked to grow up, and on that development James stakes his epic attempt to write a novel that will be a great work of art. Milton's "Paradise Lost" is the basis for James' attempt. It should suffice to say that this is a novel of "felix culpa", the fortunate fall, much like the Genesis story and even more like Milton's rewriting of it. But just as in Milton's poem, everything is pointed towards a definition of freedom. The novel certainly concerns the unexpectedly far-reaching consequences of a character's inadequacies of perception, and in that it is wholly reminiscent of "Daisy". But here alone we have a full development of necessity and freedom, circumstance and free will, in which each may take on the appearance of the other. The novel's Edenic Gardencourt is a declining, drowsy Eden. Isabel renews the vitality of this fatigued Eden. But for Isabel herself, once she struggles to an understanding of Gardencourt's high values, she will have to transform the lost place into an aspect of her spirit and have it inform her actions. Isabel is in a league with the tradition of heroines in the British realistic novel, all of them remarkable but self-deluded, in need of an encounter with the real. Isabel's final choice to return to her old life is her triumph. Intelligent readers should understand the logic of a fortunate fall. She no longer sees giving herself completely as "the deepest thing", but understands the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. This new formulation is a huge advance, as it is no longer self-referential, but acknowledging a world in which the self participates. Her decision has nothing to do with resignation nor with duty. The self is understood, with Hawthorne and against Emerson, as a result of accumulated experience. Isabel must return to Osmond, as Hawthorne's Hester finally must return to the Boston that victimized her, to affirm her identity amongst her awful relatives. This is where her life has taken place, and anywhere else would mark not a fresh start but a dissolution. And with her return come a cluster of Miltonic allusions, turned on themselves: "The world lay before her - she could do whatever she chose". Isabel discovers "a very straight path", home to her struggle, her business, her life. Earlier, she had envied a watery death, and mistaken the devil for an instrument for expanding freedom. But now she sees the danger of false Edens. Instead, Isabel chooses to make her world. The novel embodies the national myth: an ideal of freedom and equality hedged with historical blindness and pride.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Top 100 novel,
By A Customer
This review is from: Penguin Classics Portrait Of A Lady (Mass Market Paperback)
This novel is certainly in the top 100 ever written. James explores the nuances of thought and emotion in a way that no other writer before or since has mastered. A charming plot, that of young Isabel Archer, an American heiress, off to seek her destiny in Europe, and the romances and troules that befall her. You have to read this book to understand the depth of understanding this writer is able to reach.
5.0 out of 5 stars
tragic and beautiful,
By
This review is from: Penguin Classics Portrait Of A Lady (Mass Market Paperback)
I started reading this book slowly and almost gave it up, despite the strong reccomendations from a trusted friend. It's definetely not a light book for the sentences and grammar are difficult sometimes, but of course, proper for the time it was written. But the story is a beautiful one. And it's beautifully told.People seemed to complain that the book does not have a perfect ending and that the heroine makes terrible mistakes of judgement, but that is what differs a great book from some 'summer-novel' and alikes. It's about real people and real life, and things aren' t always like a hollywood romantic comedy, but nevertheless it leaves you with a precious lesson - and that what a great book is all about. Characters like Rauph Touchett and Madame Merle will be hard to forget. They were portrayed so beautifully and throughly that sometimes I felt as they were people I actually knew in real life. If you don't find Isabel Archer enough good to love her, then at least take her cousin's perspective and watch her - what she ll make of her life, her youth and her sudden fortune. A Brillant piece of literature!
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