The Portrait of a Lady

The spine is required. Ralph’s request that his father enrich Isabel is the hinge of the whole: the fortune that should let her live as her imagination asks is what makes her prey, so the bequest, Madame Merle and Osmond are one mechanism and none can be lifted out. The suitors are needed too, since her refusals of Warburton and Goodwood define the freedom she then spends. What holds the axis is what could go without loss: part of the comedy of Henrietta Stackpole and Mr Bantling, which recurs past the point where it does work, in Henrietta’s European tour and the Paris chapters; some of the slow early Albany and London passages; and Ned Rosier’s courtship of Pansy, necessary in its consequence and long in its telling. None is idle in kind, but there is more of them than the argument compels.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: freedom exercised as taste can choose its own captivity, and the choosing is no less free for being wrong. Isabel picks Osmond because he seems to ask nothing, and finds that his nothing was a whole aesthetic of possession, in which she is to be a fine object in his collection. Chapter 42 states it with full clarity: the marriage is “the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation”, a dwelling she had mistaken for wide rooms. The book discloses the double edge of the gift as well: Ralph’s generosity, meant to free her, is the cause of her ruin, and at the end he knows it. That a benefaction can be a harm, and that a woman’s independence in the 1870s was a market position, are stated so that they hold. Held off the top only because the condition is one woman’s, in one class.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The register is ironic, social and analytic, and its elevations are few but real. Chapter 42 is the chief: a night of slow recognition that reaches something near dread, as the marriage reveals itself room by room. Ralph’s death at Gardencourt, with Isabel kneeling and his “if you’ve been hated you’ve also been loved”, rises without sentiment. The ghost of Gardencourt, which Ralph had told her she could see only after suffering, appears to her at dawn: the one supernatural touch in the book, and earned. The garden at the close, with Goodwood’s kiss “like white lightning”, is the last height. Between them lie long stretches whose pleasures are comic and conversational, not elevated. What holds the axis is frequency: the heights are real, and there are three of them in fifty-five chapters.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The particular takes on archetypal weight, lightly. Isabel is the American innocent abroad and a figure of Eve: given her freedom and her fortune, she chooses knowledge and falls into it, and the book asks whether the fall was fortunate. Osmond’s house in Rome is a Bluebeard’s house, with Pansy the walled-in daughter and a secret in the closed room, that Pansy is Madame Merle’s child; the convent where Pansy is sent is its tower. The ghost of Gardencourt is a true motif, promised early and kept. These patterns are load-bearing in part, since the Eve figure and the trap are the plot. But the book builds them by implication, and much of its weight is social and psychological rather than mythic; Osmond is a type of the aesthete more than an archetype. The figure sits above evocation and a tenth below the full construction the gate asks for.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the English and European novel of the marriage plot, with Dorothea and Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871 to 1872) the nearest precedent, and James’s own international theme from Daisy Miller and The American. The swerve is in where the action is placed. The marriage plot ends with the choice; this book begins its true action after the choice, and it elides the courtship’s end and the first years of the marriage, so that Isabel’s discovery comes to the reader as it comes to her. In chapter 42 the climax is a woman thinking in a chair, which James claimed as his best thing and which later fiction of consciousness made a method. The ending refuses both conventions: no death for the heroine, no release. The stake was real: reviewers in 1881 complained of the open close, and James revised to sharpen it, not soften it. Held under 9.0 because Eliot had taken the unhappy marriage to the centre first.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a mind can be wholly deceived by what it most admires, and the form enacts it: the reader, kept close to Isabel, is given Osmond and Madame Merle much as she sees them, with only hints, as in chapter 40, where Isabel finds Merle standing while Osmond sits, a relation registered as an image before it is understood. The three-year gap is the form’s boldest act: what the marriage became is not shown but discovered, in chapter 42, as Isabel discovers it. A narrative told across those years would know less. The title is form as well: a portrait, a figure framed and looked at, which is what Osmond wants of her and what the novel refuses to leave her as. Held a step off the top by the looser chapters that hold The Inevitable.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise, across a century and more of re-examination without exhaustion. The ending alone has kept argument alive since 1881: why Isabel returns to Rome, whether for duty to Pansy, a promise, pride, the refusal of Goodwood’s sexual claim or fear of freedom itself; and Henrietta’s last words to Goodwood keep the question open. The revision of 1908 has made a second field, the comparison of two states of one novel. The book has been read as the type of the novel of consciousness, as a feminist tragedy and as an anti-feminist one, as a study of money, of American innocence, of aestheticism, and of Ralph’s vicarious love. Each yield is real and the book sustains it. Held under 9.0 because the yield turns on a single central question more than on the many interlocking ones of the largest novels.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The field is the novel in English of the later nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book moved the novel’s action inward, making a single consciousness the theatre of the plot and its climax an act of reflection, and it did so in a long, social, fully plotted book, not a sketch. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, a hinge between Eliot and the modernists. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the James novel most read and taught; it stands in F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948) as central to his line; Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence work in its wake; and the fiction of consciousness of Conrad, Ford and Woolf runs through James, of whom this is the first full achievement. Held under 9.0 because the larger break came in James’s late novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, and the book’s reach runs in part through them.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and forty-five years from book publication. Form: the text survives whole in two authorial states, both in print, with no loss; the revision is a fact of survival, not a charge. Presence: continuously in print, taught in universities across the English-speaking world and beyond, and adapted, by the BBC in 1968 and by Jane Campion in 1996, with Nicole Kidman. Fabric: it has outlived the conditions that made it; the expatriate society of Florence and Rome, the market in American heiresses and the marriage law of the 1870s are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. What holds it at the usual figure for its span is presence: it is read more in the academy and less by general readers than the most widely read novels of its century.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on James’s English, in the 1908 text. Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. The opening sentence, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”, sets the whole register: social, ironic, exact, with a shadow of ceremony. The dialogue is among the finest in the English novel: Madame Merle’s “What shall we call our ‘self’?” and her doctrine of the “envelope of circumstances”, set against Isabel’s refusal to be expressed by anything outside herself, state the book’s argument as character in a few lines. The control of irony at the narrator’s distance from Isabel, close and never merged, is complete. The revision heightens figure and sharpens the sexual charge of the ending; it is heavy in places, and that is weighed lightly. Held off the top by the slack in pacing.

Score: 9.1 / 10

One law governs the whole: every relation in the book is a question of freedom and use, of who is collecting whom. Take the two most distant elements, Henrietta’s brisk comedy of the American journalist and the terror of chapter 42. They obey the same law: Henrietta is the free woman in another key, who marries Bantling with open eyes, the comic counterpart of Isabel’s tragedy, and her last word to Goodwood is the book’s last irony. Pansy’s obedience, the Countess Gemini’s frivolity, Warburton’s decency, Ralph’s watching and Goodwood’s force are all positions on the one axis. The range is wide: social comedy, psychological tragedy, a ghost, a sexual climax; and the ghost is set early and kept, so that even the one supernatural touch obeys the law. Held off the top because the comic strand, though governed, at times sits beside the main action rather than inside it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Several orders held, and held together. Consciousness, at full depth. The family: the Touchetts’ separated marriage, the Osmond household, Pansy’s double parentage, and Isabel’s dead child, mentioned in passing, a loss the book lets lie. Money: the bank, the bequest, the market in heiresses, the ironies of a fortune given. Nation and history: America, England and Italy set against one another, and the English aristocracy in Warburton’s radical lordship. Art: Osmond’s collecting, and Rome’s ruins as the ground of Isabel’s thinking. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin: labour, which is never seen; the state, beyond Warburton’s politics; the sacred, since the convent is a prison and not a faith; the natural order, present as gardens and Roman light, as setting. The book holds a class and its relations, not a society.

Score: 8.0 / 10