The Portrait of Lady is no violent exile or displacement, but it's immigration woes at its most lyrical. Isabel Archer and her suitor Gilbert Osmond are Americans living in Europe. And the desolation she consequently feels is not merely at being away from home, but is in the absence in her life of love and ultimately of any meaning. Henry James wrote wonderful novels of the American life and way in the 19th Century, and this one is full of longing, despair and ennui rolled into one.
