Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady

I was once on an eight hour flight where the TV was broken and the only book I had with me was The Portrait of a Lady, and I still thought it was so god-awful boring that I didn’t want to read it. But this is one of the Husband’s all time, top three, favourite books, so I thought I must be missing something. Plus I have this ongoing, one-sided battle with Henry James. He doesn’t know it, of course, but he’s on The List of Authors Who Are Not Going to Beat Me (along with Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy).

It was not THAT boring this time around. But that’s only like saying, a year isn’t THAT long, or I’m not THAT hungry when really you mean, Christmas is ages away and please make me a sandwich.

Isabel Archer, who we are constantly told is captivating and intelligent and beauty, is swept over from Albany to England so that she can see Life. Life turns out to be mostly comprised of a series of men who are bewitched by her captivating intelligence and beauty and beg her without dignity to marry them. Her cousin Ralph enjoys watching the show very much and does some financial sleight of hand so that Isabel has enough money to live independently and free. Unfortunately, this just makes her even more of a honeypot for man-bees. About half the book is her choosing who to marry; the rest is whoops, wrong choice. Isabel gets caught up with Mrs Manipulation, Madame Merle and her threatening, creepy friend Mr Osmond, and his dead-eyed, stepford-obedient daughter Pansy. The villains are very villainous in the Portrait of a Lady – extremely ominous and blank. Implicit, unspoken scariness is always more horrifying than explicit scariness, I think.

Almost nothing happens for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Perhaps that would not matter so much if you actually did end up with a Portrait of a Lady. But weirdly, despite the endless millions of words, you never really get to KNOW Isabel. We’re TOLD over and over again about her many attributes and how all-round-super she is, but she’s never the sparkly heroine that I think you need to carry off all these proposals of undying love convincingly, much less hold up this enormous story by itself.

It’s also quite frustrating that James lays his symbolism on so thick. Caspar is BUSINESS and Warburton is ARISTOCRACY and Ralph is BEAUTY and Henrietta is MODERNITY but also VULGAR (though also, LOYALTY). All of them say they want what is best for Isabel, but none of them trust her to work it out for herself. They want her to be a pawn in their game instead of letting her play by herself. But then it turns out she is not actually very good at playing by herself and almost any other choice would have been better than the one she makes. So what is your point, Mr James? Women should be independent no matter what a mess they make of it? How depressing.

So it was fine, but a masterpiece? One of the best novels in the English language? Really? The English language had better pull its socks up.