Books like The Portrait of a Lady
A young American woman in 1870s Europe navigates suitors, social codes, and the trap of a marriage that looks like freedom but feels like a prison.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Portrait of a Lady
The Wings of the Dove
A dying heiress in London is surrounded by people who love her for her money, and the novel's delicate moral architecture reveals who is capable of genuine feeling.
The Aspern Papers
An American editor takes rooms in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, posing as a lodger, to get his hands on the love letters a dead Romantic poet wrote to the very old woman who lives there with her niece.
Tender Is the Night
An American couple on the French Riviera watches their marriage disintegrate under the weight of alcoholism, infidelity, and the impossibility of recovering the past.
Jenny
In Rome, Jenny Winge, a twenty-eight-year-old Norwegian painter, accepts a proposal from a younger admirer she doesn't love, and back home in Kristiania his father comes into her life.
Dodsworth
Sam Dodsworth, a newly retired Midwestern car manufacturer, sets off on a long tour of Europe with his restless wife Fran, who is determined to find the life she thinks she has missed.
The Age of Innocence
A man in 1870s New York is torn between a conventional fiancée and a scandalous countess, and the society that constrains his choice also defines who he is.
The House of Mirth
A beautiful but poor woman in Gilded Age New York navigates the marriage market with diminishing returns, and society's glittering surface conceals a machinery of destruction.
The Leopard
In 1860, as Garibaldi's troops land in Sicily, Prince Fabrizio of Salina watches the aristocratic world he was born into give way to the new Italy, and arranges his nephew's marriage to the daughter of a rich upstart.
Anna Karenina
A married aristocrat's affair with a dashing officer unravels her life, her family, and her sanity against the backdrop of Russian high society.
The Good Soldier
A naive American narrator tries to tell the 'saddest story' of his friendship with Edward Ashburnham and the four-way adultery he failed to notice until it had ended them all.
The Return of the Native
A Paris diamond merchant returns to Egdon Heath to become a schoolteacher, and his marriage to a restless woman who longs to escape the heath ends in tragedy.
After the Divorce
When Costantino is sentenced to prison for a murder he didn't commit, his wife Giovanna, under a new law allowing divorce, takes a richer husband in their Sardinian village.