Why does it happen that a seemingly highly intelligent young lady with multiple suitors will so often pick the very one who will make her life a misery? We've all seen it happen and maybe we have even tried to warn the girl, to no avail, just as the friends of Isabell Archer, James's heroine from Portrait of a Lady, caution her.
Isabell is a young American of meager fortune who is invited by a wealthy relative to travel with her in Europe. She leaves one suitor behind, but soon finds another, an English Lord, no less. She turns down offers of marriage from both, before unexpectedly becoming heir to a fortune. Almost immediately, she is befriended by an older woman, who introduces her to the man who will eventually become her husband. Over time, she comes to the realization that she has been manipulated and has chosen the wrong man. Her next choice then becomes what to do about it.
The basic plot here serves as little more than a framework for James's psychological investigations into the mind of his heroine, revealing the why's of her actions. The reader is able to understand how her very admirable strengths as a woman and an American lead her to act as she does. The novel is also filled with contrasts between Americans and Europeans, which are largely flattering to Americans, puzzling to me considering that James deserted his American citizenship.
This is Henry James in his "early period," before he became infected with a raging case of verbosity and began spewing out page-long, maze-like sentences, so it is more accessible than his other major novels. The many conversations are clever and witty; the psychological analysis seems valid; the expository digressions are few. All in all, this is the James novel I like best.
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