The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

This is a difficult book to write about. It is set in Victorian times, mostly in England and Italy. The characters are mostly Americans, but rich ones, who can afford to travel and live abroad and hobnob with the aristocracy. Yet the contact with the locals are given no attention.

The lady in question is Isabel Archer, who is started on this life by her aunt who brings her from Albany, and given a great shove forward by her uncle who leaves her a fortune. Being a beauty, Isabel is besieged by suitors, all of them eminently suitable, but she rejects them all, to marry Gilbert Osmond, an obscure collector of art. The marriage turns sour, and it turns out that Osmond collected her like a piece of art and was not prepared to let her have a mind of her own.

The novel is beautifully crafted, and each chapter seems to have style and colour of itself, as if the story is made of a number of separate panels — I suppose the motion picture idea of a scene would be an appropriate analogy.

One of the things that makes this a difficult book to write about, is that the art of conversation seems to be the atmosphere in which these people live, and I've never seen that in action.

The book begins with a very pleasant afternoon tea, and ends with a woman returning to an unraveling marriage. Despite the appealing beginning it is not a simple love story. It is in fact rather dark and seems to say that truth and honesty is no defence against calculating evil.

You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!