The Portrait of a Lady
An American woman of intelligence and means chooses badly. Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond is laid out with such psychological exactness that the suspense is moral rather than plot-driven. The silent leap between chapters 35 and 42 — the years of her ruined marriage condensed into a single, terrible page of reflection — is the most famous ellipsis in English fiction. James's first masterpiece.
James is “too fond of metaphor and long descriptive phrases,” and the page-long paragraphs make the opening chapters “nearly impossible to get through.” Isabel’s brilliance is asserted by everyone around her rather than shown by anything she does, leaving one reader with “the enticing personality of a plastic chair.” Caspar Goodwood keeps pursuing her after repeated refusals, and modern readers say “I would call the police because he is harassing her.” Book clubs argue without resolution over why she chooses as she does, some calling her “a martyr, sticking with her bad decision.” At 600-plus pages a contemporary critic filed it as “far too long, infinitely ponderous.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
