The 306 Greatest Books #42 - The Portrait of a Lady

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. This book can be found on the Sybervision and the Observer Book Lists. 

The Portrait of a Lady, and Henry James in general, fall into my unmemorable category. Neither of the two stories that I have read of his on my lists I can recall at all. The Portrait of a Lady follows an American woman, Isabel Archer, who moved to Europe and ends up having to adapt from the free thinking American way of life to the more rigid thinking of England at the time. This follows the main theme of the novel, which is the mixing of the old and the new, with often disastrous consequences for the old way of life. Overall, the story is well written with an easy flow to it, however unremarkable it may be. I enjoyed reading at the time but after many years I cannot recall the plot off the top of my head at all.