Books like The Portrait of a Lady
12 books with a reading profile close to The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a demanding read.
-
1
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Stephen Dedalus grows up in Ireland, navigating the strictures of a Catholic education and the turbulent political climate of Irish nationalism.
-
2
Villette
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Lucy Snowe, a plain, reserved young Englishwoman with no family, leaves for the town of Villette in the fictional country of Labassecour, a thinly disguised Belgium.
-
3
Letter to His Father
by Franz Kafka
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
In this unsent document, Franz Kafka addresses his father, Hermann Kafka, to dissect their dysfunctional relationship and the psychological damage caused by his father’s overbearing personality.
-
4
Ariel
by Sylvia Plath
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Ariel contains the poems Sylvia Plath wrote during the final months of her life, focusing on domestic confinement, creative rebirth, and mental disintegration.
-
5
Tender is the Night
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Dick Diver is a promising American psychiatrist living on the French Riviera during the 1920s.
-
6
The Collected Poems
by Sylvia Plath
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
This chronological assembly spans Plath’s creative output from 1956 until her death in 1963.
-
7
Crime and Punishment
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student living in a cramped St.
-
8
Lolita
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Humbert Humbert is an academic who feels an intense attraction to young girls he calls nymphets.
-
9
Mrs. Dalloway
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, psychology
Clarissa Dalloway spends a June Wednesday in 1925 London purchasing flowers and preparing her home for an evening gala.
-
10
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, literary
This sequence of 154 sonnets follows a tripartite structure involving three distinct figures.
-
11
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee
Also deep and inward-looking · psychology, literary
Middle-aged history professor George and his wife Martha return home after a campus party and invite a younger couple, Nick and Honey, for late-night drinks.
-
12
Sentimental Education
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, literary
Frédéric Moreau moves to mid-nineteenth-century Paris with vague ambitions of artistic and social success.
Get picks matched to your own reading on papr.
Get papr
