Three men gather in the garden for tea – Mr Touchett, the dying owner, Ralph, his also ailing son, and Lord Warburton, a friend and neighbour known for his “radical” new politics (although not so radical as to give up his many properties and title).
The novel begins in England, on the grounds of Gardencourt, a grand Edwardian house some forty miles from London. At one point the narrator calls themself her biographer. The Portrait Of A Lady does what it says – it is a portrait of one Isabel Archer, an early-20s American woman who is brought over to England by her aunt some time in the 1870s. As fraught as any canon is, I like this definition, mainly because it seems so manageable (it’s about 60 novels in total).
I once read that that the English literature canon could be, at its narrowest, defined as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James.
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