The Portrait of a Lady

‘The mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl… a certain young woman affronting her destiny’ is how Henry James describes his first perception of Isabel Archer, who grew into one of his most magnificent heroines.

An American heiress newly arrived in Europe, Isabel does not look to a man to furnish her with her destiny; instead she desires, with grace and courage, to find it herself. Two eligible suitors approach her and are refused. She then becomes utterly captivated by the languid charms of Gilbert Osmond. To him, she represents a superior prize worth at least seventy thousand pounds; through him, she faces a tragic choice.

Numerous critics regard The Portrait of a Lady (1882) as James’s masterpiece. F.R. Leavis declared that ‘we can’t ask for a finer exhibition of James’s peculiar gifts’, and placed it with The Bostonians as one of ‘the two most brilliant novels in the language’.