Immigration, Exile and Displacement

As Jim Burden sets down his memories of growing up as a pioneer in Black Hawk, Nebraska, his thoughts keep returning to the immigrant girl he befriended, and what she truly meant to him.

With a heavenly voice and a hit song, Irish charmer Patrick Murphy has a talent for music and an eye for the ladies. With two women pursuing their quarry in 1950’s New York, a third joins them from Ireland and she always gets what she wants.

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.