I tried to read this book around 10 years ago and abandoned it pretty quickly.  What a difference timing makes. This time I was easily pulled into Jame's lusciously descriptive prose.  To borrow a phrase from the Hamilton play, he put me right in "in the room where it happened".    I was transported into this time and place vividly and intimately.

It's hard to review this book without spoilers so I'll just say that Isabel is now one of my favorite literary characters. She's is a well-read woman of great imagination and independence who judges people on their own merits rather than letting others' opinions influence her.  She has admirable ideas that prove to be unrealistic when it comes to love.  

Besides being about Isabel, it's also a great deal about the differences between American and European culture.  I would have certainly thought the American way of courtship and matchmaking was superior, but now I'm not so sure.  There are clear flaws in both.  One thing that's clear is that whether people are well-intentioned or not, they can take you off the path you have planned for yourself.   

I loved the somewhat open ending that left room for our imaginations to take Isabel where we thought her imagination could take her.

The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all

Perhaps one of James' most accessible novels, this asks moral questions which still trouble us: what does it mean to live a 'free' life? how can we balance the constrictions and responsibilities of marriage, family and friendships with a sense of an independent self? how to negotiate the ethical character of having/not having money? That James manages this without preaching, without offering up easy or polemical answers, and wraps the whole thing up in elegant, nuanced prose is an art.

The social comedy is both sunny and deeply ironic, and the labyrinthine architecture of the novel which turns back upon itself a number of times is masterful. Reading this for the second time, I was struck by how many feelers this book puts out to previous and future literature: it looks ahead to James' own The Wings of the Dove but surely also back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke, as well as forward to Virginia Woolf's heroines who also have a sense of 'affronting [their] destiny'.

James' style is definitely more 'telling' than 'showing' but proves the inadequacy of any easy 'creative writing' hierarchy: in the hands of a craftsman, 'telling' enables polyphony and debate as much as dramatising.

Close attention to words, detail and imagery is absolutely essential to navigate our way through this narrative - the first description of Gilbert Osmond's Florentine villa, for example:

this antique, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front had a somewhat incommunicative character. It was the mask, not the face of the house. It had heavy lids, but no eyes; the house in reality looked another way

or an early description of Osmond himself: 'he was the elegant complicated medal struck off for a special occasion', which intersects with the systematic imagery of expensive objects throughout the book - paintings, porcelain, bibelots.

So a wonderfully complex, subtle, nuanced story that kept me both gripped and enthralled.

The Portrait of a Lady surprised me. I haven't enjoyed James' books in the past but I absolutely loved this. Complex characters, witty dialogue and dense but lyrical writing style. It definitely has some dense parts that I struggled with but I was amazed by the dialogue and the character development. One star is knocked off because I wasn't as emotionally invested with the ending as I hoped I would be.

Henry James was a bottom.

With this apercu in mind, you needn't get fussed up as to why Isabel Archer returns to Osmond. ~~ With the exception of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's illuminating criticism ("Epistemology of the Closet," 1990) there hasn't been any fresh Jamesian crit in over 50 years.

As the French would say, he's "de trop."

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ایزابل دختری کاملا و مستقل که بسیار مورد ستایش دیگران است. کتاب از ورود شخصیت ایزابل آغاز شده و تا ازدواج او و اتفاقات بعد از ازدواج او پیش می‌رود. مسئله مهمی که اینجا پیش آمده انتخاب درست یا غلط ایزابل، با توجه به شرایط حاکم در آن زمان و با توجه به دامنه‌ی روابط اوست. دختری که به قول پسرخاله‌اش، رالف، اگر مورد بی‌مهری قرار گرفته است، مورد مهر هم بوده. از این کتاب به عنوان یک رمان قوی یاد شده که خود هنری جیمز وصفی از این کتاب دارد که: «تصویر بانوی جوانی که تقدیر خود را خوار می‌کند.»
در این کتاب در گیر و دار دنیای آدم‌ها قبل و بعد از ازدواجشان، افکارشان و عقایدشان و نگرشی که به زندگی دارند؛ هستیم. مفهوم عشق و زندگی برای هریک متفاوت‌تر و پیچیده‌تر از دیگری‌ست.
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best thing for a portrait to be of

This is my first James (not counting his little book on Hawthorne and scattered essays on French novelists), and I started it out of a sense of dutiful curiosity. I was not prepared for it to be such an engrossing masterpiece. There so much good stuff here: the psychological portraiture, the descriptive scene painting, the simple human energy of the plot.

James is such an odd bird because he was so steeped in the 19th century French fiction, was a social intimate of such Continental wellsprings of modern fiction as Flaubert and the Goncourts, but he doesn't really resemble them. The need to nimbly and precisely render the meaningful trifles of physical appearance and gesture that you find in Flaubert, and in his faithful heirs Joyce and Nabokov, is nowhere in James. He can evoke and scene-paint with the best of them (Osmond's Florentine villa, Isabel's melancholy wandering around Rome), but it's not his obsession. In his essay on Turgenev, James spends many pages almost chuckling at the energy and time Turgenev spends visually distinguishing and individuating his characters. James is, in that way, backward: by which I mean that his fictional aesthetic is very 18th century, aiming not at visual peculiarity and novelty, but at what Johnson called "the grandeur of generality." The style too is very redolent of Johnson and Gibbon in its rounded, formal pomp, in the pageantry of its circumlocutions. This backwardness may be one significantly "American" trait of James. Henry Adams, George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks in various places point out that New England intellectual life remained firmly fixed in the 18th century well into the 19th. Johnson, Gibbon and Pope were the household gods of the colonial elite circa 1776, and they remained so long after the American Revolution. In Hawthorne, James actually singles out Hawthorne's vestigially "Augustan" style for special praise. In a book so mindful of American deficiency, the preservation of Britain's 18th century literary aesthetics is viewed as one of the new country's few cultural strengths.

So James's descriptive forbearance makes the vividness of the characters all the more spooky. I can't put my finger the device that does it. It's certainly well hidden (as Walpole said in praise of Gibbon, he is strong but doesn't show off his muscles). Maybe it's the close attention to how a voice quavers or modulates in emotionally significant ways throughout the course of conversation, or the pictorially vague but atmosphere-altering metaphors. I'm impatient to reread this novel, to become acutely conscious of its magic. I can count on one hand the number of times James tells you what Madame Merle is wearing or how she's moving, but she's as alive and embodied as the more closely drawn Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. I mention Merle in connection with Flaubert's and Tolstoy's heroines and not Isabel because, after this reading at least, I prefer Isabel as a foil for the more interesting Merle, with her deceptively amiable social masks (Merle is a very 18th century figure as well--her scenes always made me think of Lytton Strachey's descriptions of the ready wit, the tact, the armored poise and smooth sociability of ancien regime manners). My interest in the book actually lagged for a month, after Isabel's marriage to Osmond--that is, when Merle was out of the picture. Not that I'd want Merle as the heroine--no, she's a secondary character, and like Ralph Touchett, like Pansy, she goes away having but insinuated or at most only partially revealed her private history. Poignantly mysterious is how I like it.

"I'm so tired of old books about tea," said my friend Lauren recently, and I hope she stays the hell away from snobby constipated Henry James. Here he is with the least engaging first sentence in literature:

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

Many of the other sentences are also about tea. But it's not all tea; while they drink tea they talk! And talk, and talk. James reminds me of your shitty coworker who makes a lot of excuses. He spins words upon words explaining what's going on, what he's thinking, what his plans are, how his personal affairs have affected his performance, and it all sounds very convincing but at a certain point you're like but what have you done?

It's an apt title because it's a portrait. A beautiful one, full of detail and shading - "recessed and deferred complexities," James Woods calls it - but it doesn't move much. Henry James himself was aware, when he wrote its preface, that it "consisted not at all in any conceit of a 'plot'." And he makes this bizarre decision: when plot arrives - when Isabel chooses a husband, and again when she marries him, and at a momentous later decision - he skips ahead. We don't get to be there for the crucial moments of her life. It feels like looking at a mountain range wreathed in clouds; we see them going up, and we see them coming down, but we never get to see the peaks themselves. He writes between the lines, and omits the lines.

This is frustrating, and yet: I feel like this is one of those books that will be closer in the rearview mirror. It has a distinctive voice and feel. James has insight into how people work. In Colm Toibin's fictionalized biography The Master, he quietly suggests that James benefited from his closetization: he carefully pretended to be someone else throughout his life, and he got very good at pretending to be someone else. He certainly does get deep into Archer's head, and several others.

Not that he shows you everything. He shows you some things in great detail; others stay shrouded. In a way it's a psychological novel; in another way it's more like a mystery, where the crime is her life. The experience of being mystified by Isabel is frustrating; with time, though, I suspect the mystery of Isabel will stick in my head.

So, four stars. Three stars for the experience of reading it; five stars, I'm predicting, for having read it. Full of recessed and deferred complexities it is. It might also be one of those books that get better with re-reading. But the question is, how much tea can I stomach?

After having read this “Portrait”, I’ve started to respect Emma Bovary’s life choices much more:-)

Update:
I am currently reading Borges’s essays. The one of them is a prologue to James’s story “The Abasement of the Northmores”. I’ve never heard of this story before and generally I loved James’s shorter fictions. So I am going to read it. However, Borges formulates something that expands and explains what I felt about James’s characters and his way of creating his fiction.

Paradoxically James is not a psychological novelist. The situations in his books do not emerge from his characters; the characters have been fabricated to justify situations.”

That was exactly what I felt reading this novel. It is certainly pertinent to Isabel Archer as a character. It was driven by the situations and James puzzling what to do with them picking up not the most realistic scenario, but the way that interested him even if by sacrificing the depth of his characters. We’ve discussed this in the comments under this box, but I was excited that Borges expressed it that way. I also agree that James’s novels are not necessarily psychological. But he can do a very deep psychology though when he chooses so; especially through subtle details.

why won't the men leave isabel alone

There are some classics I read and do not like but still am grateful for having read. I do not think this is one of those. My gut reaction to concluding this book is definitely:



and



butttt I won't give it one star for two reasons.

1. I loved Ralph. Any moment with him was a moment I was happy.

2. I feel so emotionally frustrated with this book that I recognize there has to be something to this story. It didn't bore me. It made me mad but it didn't put me to sleep so I guess it has that going for it.

Overall, though, ridiculously flowery and not much of a plot. Some intriguing characterization, though. Glad I'm done.

I loved getting into Isabel's conflicted mind, her persuasions and her light switches turning on and off for reason. I can relate to that. I get goosebumps, or the shivers, when I can get that feeling outside. Like a soullish thing rubbing up against my skin. Ever feel like there could be ghosts? The freedom in already having lost feelings. Don't know what to do and need to get out, like Isabelle. I don't know what I think about the ending. Henry James could give judgementaly prickish endings to his stories. That gives me a panic attack. Oh well. I'm in it for the long haul-ass with Isabelle. Henry James is a terrific writer and also bad for my soul sometimes. Wanting something and finding out it is wrong. Turning over the new leaf and there's a big ass roach underneath it. Hatefulness...