Selected quotes and critical observations from and on The Portrait of a Lady:

"I don't believe you allow things to be settled for you."
"Oh yes; if they are settled as I like them." (35)--Neil

"Whether she felt grand or no, she at any rate felt busy; busy, I mean, with her thoughts."(44)--Nat

"For what is usually called social intercourse she had very little relish; but nothing pleased her more than to find her hall-table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic pasteboard." (66)
"In fact, the quality of this small ripe country seemed as sweet to her as the taste of an October pear; and her satisfaction was at the root of the good spirits which enabled her to take her cousin's chaff and return it in kind." (67)--Michelle

"Whether or no she were superior, people were right in admiring her if they thougt her so; for it seemed to her often that her mind moved more quickly than theirs, and this encouraged an impatience that might easily be confounded with superiority."  (p.59)
"Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was."  (p. 60)--Andrew

"Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang onmy wall--a Greek bas-relief to stick over my
chimney-piece" (69).--George

“She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the side-lights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side….”--Megan

"One should start by 'giving undue ecouragement to the faculty of seeing without judging,' a text." Quote from James page 45--Chris

TS#1:"Painting a lady's 'portrait' reduces her to an object for men to admire and by which they are entertained, instead of a person with whom to
interact.  Ralph's objectification of Isabel is representative of the opinions of his society, the dominant society in which  Isabel exists."  (Key
page references:  54, 69)--Catherine

TS#1: Regardless of the time period in which a piece of writing is either set, or has physically been written or published in there is an intrinsic value, a humanistic quality that can be communicated. Literature is more than the words, the sum is greater than its parts where literature is comprised not only of itself but of the interaction between itself and the society of its time of conception and production and also the individual societies and communities that are present at its imbibing.--Andrew

TS#1:Bennett and Royle give a definition of literature as “the space in which questions of personal identity are most provocatively articulated” (123).
 Henry James presents a subject, Isabel Archer, highly concerned with her own development, with herself as “I,” yet she will never be able to fully define herself in this way given the psychoanalytic view of the human subject as decentered, or, as Bennett and Royle write, “I … can never be simply or precisely who or what I think” (126).
 “She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress.” (James 61-62)--Megan

TS2: p.479:  "But I am changed; a woman has to change a good deal to marry."
   This is somewhat of an ironic statement, being that Henrietta was saying it to Isabel.  A woman does have to change when she become marriage, but not in the literal sense of identity.  And how far does one take the change? Isabel has changed incredible amounts- she has become a part of Osmond's shadow... His identity is her identity because she has sacrificed her own reality for his own. --Kelli

TS2:If literature does indeed tend towards the demonic and is about "entrancement, posession, being invaded or taken over"(156), then Isabel is the embodiment of this idea, the personification of the process we go through when we read a work of literature. I was thinking about Isabel and her room in the mansion in America where she went to read (to become entranced by literature), and the similarity between this 'office' and the 'room' she finds herself in within Gilbert's mind.  Both dark with little light available and a world outside the walls she will not or cannot see.  I'm not sure how far one can take this but I was struck by how similar these two 'rooms' are in the novel.--Michelle

Summaries by various hands of selected criticism on The Portrait of a Lady (see further critical references):

Habegger. Alfred. "The Fatherless Heroine and the Filial Son: Deep Background for The Portrait of a Lady," New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Hadley, Tessa. Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. Cambridge University Press, 2002: 23-38.

Hochenauer, Kurt. "Sexual Realism in The Portrait of a Lady: The Divided Sexuality of Isabel Archer." Studies in the Novel 22.1 (1990): 19-25.

Izzo, Donatella. "The Portrait of a Lady and Modern Narrative," New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Rowe, John Carlos.  The Other Henry James.  Durham:Duke U. P., 1998.

Sousa Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de. "Isabel's Freedom: The Portrait of a Lady." Henry James, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1987), 301-13.

Tintner, Adeline R.  “‘In the Dusky, Crowded, Heterogeneous Back-Shop of the Mind’: The Iconography of The Portrait of a Lady.”  Henry James Review 7.2-3 (Winter-Spring 1986), 140-157.

Veeder, William. "The Portrait of a Lack." New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Vopat, Carole. “Becoming a Lady: The Origins and Development of Isabel Archer’s Ideal Self.” Literature and Psychology 38.1-2 (1992): 38-56.