The Portrait of a Lady is a brilliant book about human manipulation, love, and marriage that shows just how important real-life experience is to making the right choices in life. While the focus of the novel is on the pitfalls of a young woman, making the dilemmas she faces somewhat particular to her gender, nonetheless there is plenty to be learned by all readers of this book, regardless of gender. I, for instance, first read this book right after I got married and firmly resolved that, as a reader of literature, I would never become a "sterile dilettante" like Gilbert Osmond. It is only now, three years divorced and much wiser about life, that I recognize that Osmond had never been my danger - like Isabel (and to an extent, like her cousin Ralph Touchett) my true pitfall lay in my romantic naivete. The deeper point is that this is a novel about wisdom, a clearheaded and penetrating look at the ways in which human beings lay the groundwork for their own misery.
The plot revolves around Isabel Archer, a young American who wishes to assert her independence and experience the world, an ambition that leads her to turn down excellent marriage proposals from the English aristocrat Lord Warburton and the rich American industrialist Caspar Goodwood. She is befriended in her sojourn by Mme Merle, a widow who in many ways is the woman that Isabel aspires to become. Mme Merle, in turn, introduces Isabel to Gilbert Osmond, an ambitious but relatively poor American living in Florence with his daughter Pansy, whose interest in Isabel as a person is difficult to disentangle from his interest in the fortune she inherited from her rich uncle near the book's beginning. The Portrait of a Lady is a long novel, but it never sags because of the way James divides up the story into different narrative arcs: Isabel's initial impressions of Europe, for instance, the encounters with her suitors, and so on.
Isabel's problems emerge from the contradictions of her own romantic nature. Her ideas about life are drawn largely from the novels she has read, and she uncritically equates emotional stimulation with experience. She is also, as her friend Henrietta Stackpole observes, someone who is too eager to please, willing to sacrifice herself to avoid the displeasure of others. James examines how this kind of quixotic character, while immensely charming in some ways, is turned into a puppet by those with a more clear-eyed view of the world. Indeed, the entire plot is built on an intricately woven web of lies and deceit that is somehow simple and yet, because of the genius for ambiguity with which James infuses both his characters and his prose, remains psychologically complex. My favorite example is when Isabel asks Mme Merle, "What have you to do with me?" and the latter replies: "Everything." Thus, Mme Merle confesses her deceitfulness (which the reader, but not Isabel, knows about all along), and yet does so in a manner that is so void of details, so utterly opaque that it tells us nothing more.
The Victorian era was a time of stifling conformity, and often this atmosphere can force novels from that period into having an unhappily forced conventional ending (see my review of
Lady Audley's Secret
, for instance). In this book, though, James turns that premise on its head, so that it is not the strange and subversive that the readers finds threatening, but rather the return to normality and the enforcement of the marriage contract. James pays lip service to the conventional Victorian ending, but it is a conclusion that is so chilling, so upsetting, that readers can only look upon it as a tragedy. The Portrait of a Lady does require some patience, but it is without doubt one of the greatest novels of all time.
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Reviews with images
Missing the ending
This printing is missing the ending. I didn’t realize it until I read the last page. Incredibly frustrating. Ahh!
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Paul N.
Nice to be able to clothbound books in at least ...
Reviewed in Canada on March 19, 2017
