The Portrait of a Lady

About The Portrait of a Lady

James develops the drama through attention to what Isabel notices, values, and fails to question. Rooms, conversations, and carefully managed impressions create a world in which power seldom announces itself directly. The novel's interest lies in the difficulty of translating an ideal of independence into choices made among people with motives of their own.

Reading focus

Follow an independent young woman's European education in choice, where wealth and opportunity complicate rather than settle the problem of freedom.

This reading edition contains 231,950 words in 56 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Henry James. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

“The Portrait of a Lady” was, like “Roderick Hudson,” begun in Florence, during three months spent there in the spring of 1879. Like “Roderick” and like “The American,” it had been designed for publication in “The Atlantic Monthly,” where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from its two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to month, in “Macmillan’s Magazine”; which was to be for me one of the last occasions of simultaneous “serialisation” in the two countries that the changing conditions of literary intercourse between England and the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long in writing it; I remember being again…

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