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The Portrait of a Lady is a film adaptation of Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady directed by Jane Campion. The film stars Nicole Kidman, Barbara  Based on‎: ‎The Portrait of a Lady‎; by ‎Henry James.
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Decades after I first encountered the passage, it has lost none of its thrill and lustre.


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The beauty of the telling should not be confused with the loveliness of the scene, whatever the enticement of the greensward; hundreds of writers have tried their hand at Old World pastoral and got stuck in a sentimental mud. Already, however, we find ourselves wanting to ask, of those turnings of hers: are they feline and purposeful, or more akin to the flutters of a flag in a breeze?

Will this impressionable young woman, apparently so open to experience, end up in its pitiless thrall? Not that his son was a stranger to the magazine. Where, one was forced to ask, did this young James fellow belong? To what, or to whom, did his loyalties cling? This is, in short, a book about a book, joining a select band of the equally fixated. Note that all the authors honored in this list are themselves obsessives: men prepared to devote any amount of time and intellectual industry, and to renounce almost everything, in the exhausting bid to wrestle the world into words, leaving us to revere the result and to inquire how much was entailed in the sacrifice.

A plain chronology seems manageable. Isabel Archer, of Albany, aged twenty-one, and conveniently parentless, is brought by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, to England. There she meets her uncle, the aging Mr.

The Portrait of a Lady

She spends time in London, largely with her friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American reporter, who nourishes fewer illusions about European allure. Touchett dies.


  1. Phoenix Project;
  2. Plot Overview;
  3. The Golden Baobab Tree.
  4. From Loner to Leader: A Testament of How I Survived.
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  6. Isabel makes the acquaintance of Madame Merle, a handsome, baffling friend of Mrs. To his imperfections, which are grave and irredeemable, Isabel alone seems blind, and she consents to marry him. She becomes stepmother to the teen-age Pansy, who is later courted by a young American named Rosier and, for good measure, by Warburton, who will lose no opportunity to draw near to Isabel once more.

    Pansy, we learn, is in fact the product of an adulterous liaison between Osmond and Madame Merle. On hearing that Ralph is close to death, Isabel, against the orders of her disobliging husband, returns to the English house where we first observed her, and where she stays until Ralph passes away.

    What happens next we do not know. Plenty occurs to Isabel, in body and mind, with a frequency that suggests both comic and tragic modes; her pursuers pop up with the unexpected flourish of farceurs Warburton is suddenly there, before her, in the Roman Forum , while a stalking mortality is never far behind. Perhaps I shall find out. There are many things in life; you are very young. Isabel Archer is a woman in her early twenties who comes from a genteel family in Albany, New York, in the late s. Her mother died when she was a young girl, and her father raised her in a haphazard manner, allowing her to educate herself and encouraging her independence.

    As a result, the adult Isabel is widely read, imaginative, confident in her own mind, and slightly narcissistic; she has the reputation in Albany for being a formidable intellect, and as a result she often seems intimidating to men. She has had few suitors, but one of them is Caspar Goodwood, the powerful, charismatic son of a wealthy Boston mill owner.

    Isabel is drawn to Caspar, but her commitment to her independence makes her fear him as well, for she feels that to marry him would be to sacrifice her freedom.

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    Shortly after Isabel's father dies, she receives a visit from her indomitable aunt, Mrs. Touchett, an American who lives in Europe. Touchett offers to take Isabel on a trip to Europe, and Isabel eagerly agrees, telling Caspar that she cannot tell him whether she wishes to marry him until she has had at least a year to travel in Europe with her aunt. Isabel and Mrs.

    Touchett leave for England, where Mrs. Touchett's estranged husband is a powerful banker.

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    Isabel makes a strong impression on everyone at Mr. Touchett's county manor of Gardencourt: her cousin Ralph, slowly dying of a lung disorder, becomes deeply devoted to her, and the Touchetts' aristocratic neighbor Lord Warburton falls in love with her. Warburton proposes, but Isabel declines; though she fears that she is passing up a great social opportunity by not marrying Warburton, she still believes that marriage would damage her treasured independence. As a result, she pledges to accomplish something wonderful with her life, something that will justify her decision to reject Warburton.

    Isabel's friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American journalist, believes that Europe is changing Isabel, slowly eroding her American values and replacing them with romantic idealism. Goodwood again presses Isabel to marry him; this time, she tells him she needs at least two years before she can answer him, and she promises him nothing. She is thrilled to have exercised her independence so forcefully.

    Touchett's health declines, and Ralph convinces him that when he dies, he should leave half his wealth to Isabel: this will protect her independence and ensure that she will never have to marry for money. Touchett agrees shortly before he dies.

    Plot Overview

    The Portrait of a Lady has received critical acclaim since its first publication in The Atlantic Monthly , and it remains the most popular of James's longer fictions. Contemporary critics recognise that James had pushed the analysis of human consciousness and motivation to new levels, particularly in such passages as the famous Chapter 42, where Isabel meditates deep into the night about her marriage and the trap she seems to have fallen into.

    More recent criticism has been levied by feminists. In particular, Isabel's final return to Osmond has fascinated critics, who have debated whether James sufficiently justifies this seemingly paradoxical rejection of freedom. One interpretation is: Isabel both feels as honour-bound to the promise she has made to stepdaughter Pansy as she does to her marriage to Osmond, and she believes that the scene her "unacceptable" trip to England will create with Osmond will leave her in a more justifiable position to abandon her dreadful marriage.

    The extensive revisions James made for the New York Edition have generally been accepted as improvements, unlike the changes he made to other texts, such as The American or Roderick Hudson. The revision of the final scene between Isabel and Goodwood has been especially applauded. As Edward Wagenknecht noted, James "makes it as clear as any modern novelist could make it by using all the four-letter words in the dictionary that [Isabel] has been roused as never before in her life, roused in the true sense perhaps for the first time in her life.

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    Crane — may have influenced James, who Habegger considers was interested in Crane's female characters. In the preface to the New York Edition of the novel, James referred to several of George Eliot 's female protagonists as possible influences on the Portrait. Habegger questions this and quotes others as doing the same. Hadella also mentions the similarities with Crane.

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    In , when the actor Lawrence Barrett wanted James to turn the novel into a play, James replied that he did not think it could be done. It was also adapted in Urdu language in s by a Pakistani television drama Parchaiyan. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the Henry James novel. For other uses, see The Portrait of a Lady disambiguation.

    This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. April The Portrait of a Lady. Serenity Publishers. Henry James. Chelsea House Publishers. The Portrait of a Lady'.