The Anglo-American novelist Henry James (1843–1916) is a recognized classic of world literature, a master of psychological analysis, a brilliant stylist and innovator, the author of more than twenty novels ("The Ambassadors", "The Wings of the Dove", "The Golden Bowl", "The Europeans", etc.); James also wrote over a hundred novellas and stories, plays, a three-volume autobiography, travel and critical essays. Born in New York, the writer spent most of his life in the Old World, primarily in England, where he died, having acquired British citizenship a year before his death. Having learned from the lessons of Balzac, Hawthorne, Ibsen, and Turgenev, Henry James himself had a significant influence on all psychological prose of the 20th century, and he is rightly called a predecessor of such writers as Conrad, Proust, and Virginia Woolf. "Women's Portrait" is among the most significant works of Henry James and is recognized as "one of the greatest novels written in English." According to the author, "Women's Portrait" is a novel about a woman who challenges her fate. The plot is based on the story of a young American woman, with a delicate and noble nature, charming, internally independent, and curious, who arrives in Europe, firmly convinced that the world is full of inexhaustible possibilities, and that female happiness is far from being exhausted by a successful marriage... In 1968, a miniseries was made based on the novel, and its plot was also the basis for Jane Campion's film "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996) starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich in the main roles.
