1. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) - When James began this book he was a promising young writer with a special line in depicting the lives of Americans in Europe. When he finished it he had become a figure in the history of the novel itself. This story of a young American woman in England and Italy—of her stifling marriage and her desperate fight for freedom—stands as a link between two centuries. It’s the bridge on which the loose expansive Victorian novel flowed over into the formal concentration of modernism; the link, say, between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.