Customer Reviews

The Portrait of a Lady (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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Someone, I can't recall who, once called Henry James the child of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. And in his ability to make complete characters, to fully form individuals in even the bit players and bring them to life, he truly has inherited a gift from his supremely talented artistic forebears. The Portrait of a Lady is largely centered on a single individual, Isabel Archer, and how she moves in and through other people's lives, changing everyone around her, while seemingly remaining untouched, insulated by her own purity.

Isabel will remind many classics fans of George Eliot's greatest heroine, Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch. And like Middlemarch, this grand novel has a complex and sometimes contradictory perspective on marriage. Isabel will seem to some a true feminist, and to others a woman trapped by the strictures of her time. Yet James never truly elucidates his own thoughts; he simply and beautifully (and sometimes painfully) sketches in the many facets of human relationships, and allows the reader to color it with his or her own perspective.

The back of this book declares The Portrait of a Lady to be "nearly aesthetically perfect". The statement is grand, but I have to agree. In its timelessness and ability to capture human nature, this is truly a classic worth everyone's time.