Capturing the grandeur of a gracious,splendid Europe of wealth and Old World sensibilities, this glorious, complex novel has become a touchstone for a great writer’s entire literary achievement. From the opening pages,when the high-spirited American girl Isabel Archer arrives at the English manor Gardencourt,James’s luminous, superbly crafted prose creates an atmosphere of intensity, expectation,and incomparable beauty.Isabel, who has been taken abroad by an eccentric aunt to fulfill her potential, attracts the passions of a British aristocrat and a brash American, as well as the secret adoration of her invalid cousin,Ralph Touchett……

PREFACE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

……

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 "serialization" 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 writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of the house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came .in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase,of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight. But I recall vividly enough that the response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer theartist a questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out With a lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a time he feels, while thus yeanung towards them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an "army of glorious veterans to help him arrest a peddler who has gven him the wrong change……