Jean Strouse

The author, most recently, of 'Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers'

- Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

By Henry James (1881)

1 Only a few books, in my view, merit rereading every few years. Henry James's novel "The Portrait of a Lady" is one.

James later wrote that the germ of his idea was not a plot but a single character"the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl." The book begins when his young American, Isabel Archer, arrives at the English estate of some relatives. With youth, beauty, wealth and grand notions of freedom, Isabel declines to the immensely attractive Lord Warburton as she sets out on her European adventure and is unwittingly coerced by a pair of malign actors into making a terrible choice. James's great theme was the growth of imagination and knowledge, as his innocent Americans abroad learn to see-matters usually having to do with betrayal, and with sex.

In the novel's central scene, Isabel sits up one night and slowly takes in all that has happened and where she is. That stream-ofconsciousness passage led later writers to dispense with linear time and conventional plot, capturing the flow and tumbling associations of their characters' minds. "Portrait" changed literary culture. It is also pure pleasure to read.

The Silent Woman

By Janet Malcolm (1993)