AMONG those novels of the nineteenth century which continue to be read and discussed as models of fictive craft and as major contributions to humanity's comprehension of itself. The Portrait of a Lady stands out for the complexity of its chief character, the compelling nature of its story, the density of its range of cultural reference, and the artfulness of its conception and execution. Like Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Middlemarch, it focuses on the question of a woman's destiny and the conditions and consequences of modern marriage. But, like The Scarlet Letter, Miss Ravenel's Conversion, A Modern Instance, and The Awakening, it places those pressing issues in a specifically – indeed, uniquely – American context, in that international context of Americans returning to the Old World which was largely to define the work of Henry James.

Why was the “international theme” so central to James's work in general, and to Portrait in particular? For one thing, James considered it a “complex fate” to be an American, by which he meant, to take his phrase literally, that that fate was woven of many strands – European descent (for good or ill, James's world is resolutely Eurocentric), a Puritan background set against a developing libertarian tradition, a kind of self-imposed cultural barrenness, a presumptive innocence or at least detachment from the ills and iniquities of Europe, a sense of oneself as open to new opportunities and modes of self-definition.