Henry James Portrait
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
The Portrait of a Lady is a collected serial novel first released between 1880 and 1881, and then officially compiled into a book in 1881, by Henry James.
The Portrait of a Lady tells the story of Isabel Archer, a young American suddenly confronted with a considerable amount of money from an inheritance. She quickly comes under attack, however, by a pair of con-artists looking to take her fortune from her. She naively marries one, a man named Osmund, but their relationship sours when she discovers not only his overt bravado but his lack of affection towards her.
But when she discovers that a friend is sick and dying, she returns home - against her husband’s wishes - to tend to him in his last days. And though at the end of the novel she does return to Rome (where she lived with Osmund) it’s left open whether or not she actually continued to live with her husband.
The Portrait of a Lady has since been turned into a mini-series by the BBC in 1968 and a film in 1996, with Nicole Kidman as Isabel and John Malkovich as Osmund.