In the Library
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James, 1881
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 55
- Length
- Length 224k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot writes the same story of a woman who marries the wrong man, but gives Dorothea a second chance Isabel never gets.
£1.99
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy traps another brilliant woman in a marriage that becomes a prison, and the walls are just as elegant.
£1.99
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James
James returns to the same territory: Americans in Europe, money as a weapon, and innocence destroyed by those who claim to love it.
£1.99
About the book
On a long English lawn at Gardencourt, three men take afternoon tea and a young American woman walks toward them with the whole of her life still unspent, certain she will not let anyone choose it for her. Isabel Archer has a fortune she did not seek, a mind that refuses every easy comfort, and two suitors any sensible woman would take; she sends them both away and gives herself instead to Gilbert Osmond, a connoisseur of beautiful objects who has decided she is one. Henry James writes her ruin so slowly you feel the air going out of the rooms. Then, in a single midnight chapter, he sits her alone before a dying fire and lets her trace, thought by thought, exactly how a free woman talked herself into a locked house. The terrible tenderness of the book is that it never once lets you stop loving her for it; her ruin is made entirely of her own best qualities, her courage, her refusal to be saved.