Portrait of Jennie
Good Books rating 4.28
Technical:
- ID: 57
- Added: 2025-08-22
- Updated: 2025-09-02
- Published: 1976-01-01
- Reviews: 7
Reviews
Pull quotes
- There is something ethereal here in Portrait of Jennie that nearly defies description.
- Robert Nathan imbued this story with some intangible magic that either touches our heart when it is still open to love and romance.
- Passages and sentiments so touching that once read, they are never forgotten by the reader.
Pull quotes
- Portrait of Jennie broods and yearns—it is just Nathan’s second novel written in first person—and often feels lost in a foggy desire for love and durance.
- The ghostliness of both book and movie is a key part of their draw.
- It gives us a frustrated artist, the painter Eben Adams, who discovers the love of his life—except that she is living in a different flow of time.
Pull quotes
- Robert Nathan's lyrical prose is absorbing in its depth and detail.
- He draws the reader into his atmospheric mood piece with profound questions and statements on art, life, love, death, and time.
- I find Nathan to be an underrated author and would gladly read more of his work.
Pull quotes
- Robert Nathan imbued this story with some intangible magic that either touches our heart when it is still open to love and romance, or falls flat and shames us because our heart has been worn down and tainted by our crass modern world.
- There is something ethereal here in Portrait of Jennie that nearly defies description.
- Once read, they are never forgotten by the reader.
Pull quotes
- Nathan is forced to make Jennie pretty much a complete enigma.
- The two main characters don’t spend much time together and, in the end, the highlight of their relationship turns out to be just one fairly perfect day.
- Portrait of Jennie is a sort of proto-time-loop story.
Pull quotes
- The novel is an uncertain fairytale about the potency of love and art, on the one hand, and time and death, on the other.
- What power does love have—mortal love but also, implicitly, divine love—to hold and save the different selves we are in the course of a life, however short?
- Nathan once again packs the grandest and most human of themes into the short and seemingly gauzy spaces of his fictions.
Pull quotes
- Robert Nathan's lyrical prose is absorbing in its depth and detail.
- He draws the reader into his atmospheric mood piece with profound questions.
- Portrait of Jennie is considered a modern masterpiece of fantasy fiction.