The Portrait of a Lady Volume 1

The Portrait of a Lady, Volume 1 is the first volume of Henry James’s major early novel, serialised in the Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan’s Magazine across 1880 and 1881 and published in book form in 1881. The novel was issued in two and three volume formats in different editions and this volume gives the first half of the story, from Isabel Archer’s arrival in England through her decision to marry Gilbert Osmond.

Isabel Archer is a young American woman from Albany, intelligent, energetic, and entirely untested by the world. Her aunt Mrs Touchett brings her to England and settles her in the Touchett family country house at Gardencourt, outside London. Her uncle Mr Touchett is dying. Her cousin Ralph, also gravely ill from a wasting condition, becomes devoted to her and watches her with a particular tender attention. Isabel attracts a series of proposals. The English nobleman Lord Warburton offers her his hand and his place in English society. She refuses. The American businessman Caspar Goodwood arrives from Boston and offers her his persistent love. She refuses him too. She wants her freedom more than she wants any marriage, however suitable.

The central event of the first volume is Ralph’s quiet suggestion to his dying father that the family fortune should be divided in a way that gives Isabel substantial independent means. The bequest is made. Isabel becomes a wealthy young woman and finds herself in possession of exactly the freedom she had wanted. The second half of the volume follows her on the Continent, where she meets Madame Merle, the elegant American expatriate friend of her aunt, and through Madame Merle she meets Gilbert Osmond. The volume ends with Isabel’s decision to marry Osmond, a decision that nearly everyone who cares about her tries to prevent.

The novel is the book in which James first brought all his characteristic interests together in a single fully realised work. The international subject, the moral question of how a free young person uses freedom, the careful slow development of the social fabric, are all present. The volume runs about three hundred pages. For readers willing to commit to the major novel, this is the necessary first half. Volume two completes the story.