P= Portrait of a Lady

I was confused which book I wanted for P– Pride and Prejudice or The Portrait of a Lady.  Both of these books are antithesis of each other. While Pride and Prejudice showed the perfect woman in Elizabeth and glamour of romance, Portrait of a Lady shows ugly side of that romance.

What appealed to me in The Portrait of a Lady was the price of the freedom. Isabella, the heroine of the novel, rejected two perfectly nice proposals because she wanted to savor her independence. She had the inheritance to do so and the willpower in her. But finally when she selects a person to marry, he turns out to be a not-so-good egoist. The friction in their marriage increases day by day. She leaves her home, without telling her husband, to spend time with her dying mentor. The ending of the story is ambiguous. We don’t get to know if Isabella finally leaves her husband or not

I remember discussing this story with my friends. “Of course, she went back to her husband. She made her bed, and she should stick to her decision,” one of them said. Another one said, “If she had the courage to leave those suitors behind her, why couldn’t she leave her husband too?”  And I– I didn’t say anything. I believe that in this ambiguous ending both her decisions would make me happy. Because they would be her decisions alone. They wouldn’t have been based on somebody else’s choice.

I read this book ages ago, so my memory is a little dusty about many thing in the book. But I do remember that the book had its ups and downs. Like all the classics, it went on and on to describe everything. And then it left me thirsting for more.