Recommendations
Books Like The Portrait of a Lady
Best books to read after The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
James's 1881 masterpiece follows Isabel Archer, a spirited young American woman who comes into a fortune and uses her freedom to make the worst possible choice in marriage to the cold, selfish Gilbert Osmond. These recommendations extend the experience through James's other major novels, through fiction that shares its portrait of a young woman of exceptional intelligence and feeling trapped by a world that cannot accommodate her, and through novels that examine the cultural encounter between American idealism and European sophistication.
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The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
James's 1902 late masterpiece and the closest companion to The Portrait of a Lady in the James canon: Milly Theale, another young American woman of exceptional qualities who comes to Europe, is deceived by those who want her money rather than herself. Where Isabel chooses her fate (disastrously), Milly has it imposed on her — but both novels are about the destruction of American innocence by European or expatriate worldliness.
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The Ambassadors
by Henry James
James's 1903 novel — written after The Portrait of a Lady and considered his most technically perfect. Lambert Strether goes to Paris and discovers too late that he has never truly lived. Where The Portrait of a Lady traces Isabel's loss of freedom, The Ambassadors traces Strether's belated discovery that he never exercised his. Both novels are about missed life, but approached from opposite ends of a character's career.
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The Golden Bowl
by Henry James
The third of James's major phase novels (1904): Maggie Verver, another young American woman in Europe, discovers that her husband Prince Amerigo is having an affair with her best friend Charlotte Stant — and decides to reclaim her marriage through a strategy of perfect knowledge and perfect silence. Where Isabel Archer fails because she acts too openly on her idealism, Maggie succeeds by becoming as calculating as those around her.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian companion to The Portrait of a Lady: Dorothea Brooke, another woman of exceptional feeling and intelligence who makes a disastrous first marriage to an older, selfish man (the scholar Casaubon) in the belief that he offers something her provincial world does not. Both James and Eliot are analyzing the specific ways that a nineteenth-century woman's idealism becomes the instrument of her entrapment.
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Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Eliot's 1876 novel and the closest Victorian equivalent to The Portrait of a Lady's plot: Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful young woman who marries the cold, domineering Henleigh Grandcourt out of financial necessity and discovers too late the nature of the man she has bound herself to. Gwendolen and Isabel are the two great Victorian-era heroines who choose their own destruction with their eyes open.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's 1905 American companion: Lily Bart, another woman of exceptional beauty and intelligence who is destroyed by the social world that formed her, partly because she cannot bring herself to perform the hypocrisies that survival requires. Where Isabel Archer is destroyed by the wrong choice, Lily Bart is destroyed by her inability to make the right one — but both novels are devastating about what happens to women who are too good for their worlds.
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Washington Square
by Henry James
James's 1880 novel — written just before The Portrait of a Lady and the most compressed early version of the same theme: Catherine Sloper, deceived by a suitor who wants her money rather than herself, is left with the cold knowledge of what she was worth to him. Washington Square is James at his most stripped-down and most directly painful; reading it alongside The Portrait of a Lady shows the full range of James's treatment of female innocence and its exploitation.
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1920 novel — Newland Archer, engaged to the conventional May Welland, falls in love with her unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska. Where The Portrait of a Lady is about an American woman's education in the cruelty of the European world, The Age of Innocence is about an American man's discovery that his own world is equally cruel — both novels dissect the costs of idealism in a society governed by social code.
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