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The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1881
Pages: 225

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Read by Elizabeth Klett · 23 h 6 min · 55 parts

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Chapter 1
24:56
Chapter 2
14:34
Chapter 3
20:34
Chapter 4
16:27
Chapter 5
29:32
Chapter 6
22:08
Chapter 7
22:35
Chapter 8
14:55
Chapter 9
15:32
Chapter 10
27:12
Chapter 11
15:55
Chapter 12
26:00
Chapter 13
31:52
Chapter 14
22:17
Chapter 15
34:28
Chapter 16
28:05
Chapter 17
16:05
Chapter 18
36:49
Chapter 19
48:26
Chapter 20
32:00
Chapter 21
16:28
Chapter 22
43:49
Chapter 23
21:02
Chapter 24
32:48
Chapter 25
13:41
Chapter 26
31:23
Chapter 27
24:58
Chapter 28
14:59
Chapter 29
21:47
Chapter 30
12:56
Chapter 31
16:34
Chapter 32
16:36
Chapter 33
15:39
Chapter 34
22:39
Chapter 35
18:50
Chapter 36
20:37
Chapter 37
24:57
Chapter 38
25:19
Chapter 39
29:24
Chapter 40
32:34
Chapter 41
19:11
Chapter 42
36:13
Chapter 43
27:08
Chapter 44
33:34
Chapter 45
26:11
Chapter 46
25:21
Chapter 47
31:47
Chapter 48
37:01
Chapter 49
30:33
Chapter 50
18:17
Chapter 51
36:18
Chapter 52
26:04
Chapter 53
19:41
Chapter 54
26:25
Chapter 55
35:04

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is a public domain work.

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About this book

The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, serialised in the Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine during 1880 and 1881 and published in book form in 1881. It is the major novel of his early maturity and is generally considered the best book of his first phase, before the experimental shorter novels of the 1890s and the great late masterworks of the 1900s.

Isabel Archer is a young American woman from Albany, brought to England by her aunt Mrs Touchett and introduced to the Touchett household at Gardencourt, a country house outside London. Her uncle Mr Touchett is dying. Her cousin Ralph, also gravely ill, becomes her devoted friend and admirer. Isabel attracts several proposals of marriage, including from the English Lord Warburton and from the American businessman Caspar Goodwood, and refuses both. When her uncle dies he leaves her a substantial fortune, on Ralph's quiet suggestion, so that she may have the freedom to choose her own life. The freedom is exactly what destroys her. In Florence she meets Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate of refined taste and limited fortune, introduced to her by Madame Merle, an apparently elegant friend of her aunt. Isabel marries Osmond. The second half of the novel works out the long consequences of that marriage.

The book is the novel where James first brought all his characteristic interests into a single fully realised work. There is the international subject, with Isabel as the American girl carried to Europe. There is the moral interest in the question of how a free young person actually uses freedom when it is given to her. There is the slow development of the central marriage and the gradual revelation of who Madame Merle and Osmond actually are. There is the famous chapter in which Isabel sits up alone through the night and works out what her marriage has become.

The novel runs about six hundred pages and is essential reading for any serious reader of nineteenth century English fiction. For readers new to James this is the recommended starting place after the shorter Daisy Miller. It pairs naturally with The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors, the great late novels that take the same central interests further.

About the author

Henry James

Henry James was an American-British writer and a master of the psychological novel. Works such as The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, and The Ambassadors explore consciousness, society, and the clash between American and European life.