The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

'One ought to choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that.'Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a 'house of suffocation'.Considered by many one of the finest novels in the English language, this is Henry James's most poised achievement, written at the height of his fame in 1881. It is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late. This edition reproduces the revised New York Edition, with James's own Preface.

Roger Luckhurst is the author of several books on Victorian literature and culture, and the Gothic and science fiction. He is a regular reviewer and commentator on BBC Radio 4. For OUP his books include The Invention of Telepathy (2002) and The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880-1900 (2000). For Oxford World's Classics he has edited Late Victorian Gothic Tales and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199217946
ISBN 10	0199217947
Title	The Portrait of a Lady
Author	Henry James
Series	Oxford World's Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2009-04-09
Number of pages	640
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.