Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady

James, Henry

Paperback

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN13: 9791043138393
Publisher: Les Prairies Numeriques
Published: Feb 26 2026
Pages: 822
Weight: 2.38
Height: 1.82 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The Portrait of a Lady is widely held to be the outstanding work of Henry James's early period, and among the finest novels of his entire career.When the eccentric Mrs. Touchett takes up her charming American niece, Isabel Archer, and returns with her to England, her husband and son, the invalid Ralph, are first mystified, then bemused. Soon, however, they are smitten, as also is their aristocratic neighbor, Lord Warburton. It is not long until a proposal of marriage comes from the English lord, but Isabel is not so quickly conquered. Besides, she has left a rejected suitor back in Boston, an archetypal American industrial magnate, Caspar Goodwood.Through a surprising bequest in Mr. Touchett's will, Isabel becomes a wealthy heiress. As she travels with her aunt through Europe, Isabel encounters several remarkable figures in the American émigré communities in which Mrs. Touchett has her social circles. She also is led towards a third suitor in Florence, and this encounter proves decisive.The novel took shape as James travelled on the Continent, after having lived in London for some years. That sense of place and displacement suffuses the book, but it remains the backdrop to the main business of the story: the unfolding of relationships around the figure of Isabel Archer. James explains in an illuminating preface how his heroine and her attendant characters took hold of him. His artistic vision was to display Isabel's character in action, embedded in this web of relations.The Portrait of a Lady is one of the supreme examples of James's capacity to display how moral imagination and concrete action emerge in character. But along with this, the novel explores the perception and persistence of love, dissects the psychological gradations between magnanimity and malice, and contrasts the energy and ambition of the new world with the allure and ennui of the old.This Standard Ebooks edition follows the New York edition, which incorporates the revisions James made to his text in 1908, almost thirty years after he first wrote it.

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