The Portrait of a Lady
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.36 (865 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B073QLM9X6 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 450 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-04-07 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Stunning" according to Annie Maus. It's embarrassing that I've reached a mature age without ever having read anything by Henry James. I'd always wanted to, but every time I started The Ambassadors or The Portrait of a Lady, I'd give up after a couple chapters. Recently I had a chunk of time and I decided to try again, with The Portrait of a Lady. What an incredible book! To read a 19th Century masterpiece is a very different experience from reading a lot of contemporary literary fiction: you're forced to read deeply. The pace is slow, the unveil. An arduous but compelling read Theia111 Though Henry James introduces quite a few characters in this saga, it is worth the effort to stay with his development of each one of them. A bright, independent and innocent American orphan who moves to London, Isabel, becomes the subject/object of the love of several men. Lord Warburton (sp?) is my favorite and perhaps everyone's, followed by Ralph, her devoted but consumptive cousin. In addition a persistent American industrialist haunts Isabel throughout. But she falls for an Italian, an unremarkable artist. What Have You To Do With Me? The Portrait of a Lady is a brilliant book about human manipulation, love, and marriage that shows just how important real-life experience is to making the right choices in life. While the focus of the novel is on the pitfalls of a young woman, making the dilemmas she faces somewhat particular to her gender, nonetheless there is plenty to be learned by all readers of this book, regardless of gender. I, for instance, first read this book right after I got married and firmly resolved that, as a reader of literatu
A few of the major ones being love, death, personal responsibility, personal identity, freedom, ethics (or lack thereof) and the New world versus the Old world. Isabel Archer - beautiful, young and spirited - visits her wealthy relatives in England, rejects marriage proposals by two more or less worthy suitors, inherits a fortune and then is manipulated into marriage to one of the most cruel creatures imaginable: Gilbert Osmond This is just scratching the surface of this colossal, monumental work, so rich in both its prose, its characters and its ma