The Portrait of a Lady - Fourth eBook

The most widely read of all James’s early works, Portrait of a Lady, a psychological novel with a great plot, revolves around Isabel Archer, an American charming, attractive girl. She turns down the rich Lord Warburton and the decent Gaspar Goodwood to marry an American expatriate in Italy, Gilbert Osmond, a fastidious, nasty, vile would-be artist. Isabel will not leave him in spite of his wickedness, but the novel is not just the story of a wrong marriage and an upright American girl. It is a novel about a penniless girl who inherits a fortune thanks to the undeclared love of her invalid sensitive cousin, about a provincial American girl who becomes a cosmopolitan aristocrat, and much more than this, about the impact of modern American life on the ancient European culture. The Original English version with a fictionalized introduction in Italian by Leo Wright.
Henry James (Henry James Jr until his father’s death in 1882) was born in New York on April 15, 1843, and died in Rye, East Sussex, England, on February 28, 1916. His father was a distinguished theological writer and lecturer; his elder brother, William, the well-known American psychologist and pragmatic philosopher. Henry James read law at Harvard and as a young man travelled back and forth between Europe and America. He was also educated in London, Paris, Bologna, Bonn and Geneva. In 1865 he began to write literary reviews and short stories. After living in Paris, in 1869 he made his home in England, and later took British citizenship. As a novelist, he wrote both about American living abroad and about English people. His main works are: Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877) Daisy Miller (1879), Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Tragic Muse (1890), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904), The Altar of the Dead (1909), and three volumes of memoirs. Henry James is considered the master of the psychological novel.

Leo Wright is a researcher on the structure and psychology of the Victorian novel.