The Portrait of a Lady

Isabel Archer, a spirited young American from Albany, arrives in Europe determined to live entirely on her own terms, and turns down two genuinely advantageous proposals, one from the English aristocrat Lord Warburton and one from the persistent American suitor Caspar Goodwood, in the name of that independence. Her sickly, generous cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her without ever declaring it, arranges secretly for his dying father to leave Isabel a substantial fortune, wanting simply to give her the freedom to do something interesting with her life. Instead the money delivers her straight into the hands of Gilbert Osmond, a cultivated, penniless American expatriate in Florence whose courtship is engineered from the start by his friend Madame Merle, and Isabel marries him only to discover, slowly and too late, that Osmond's polish conceals a controlling, contemptuous egotism. Worse, she eventually learns that Osmond's daughter Pansy, whom he has always presented as the child of his first marriage, is actually Madame Merle's own daughter by him, the product of a long secret affair the two of them have kept from Isabel entirely. When Ralph is finally dying at his family's English estate, Isabel goes to him and stays until the end, confessing to him for the first time how unhappy her marriage has become; Caspar Goodwood, meeting her there, makes one last impassioned plea for her to leave Osmond, embraces her, and is refused. Isabel sets off again for Rome, and James leaves what she chooses to do next, whether to return to Osmond out of duty to Pansy or to break from him entirely, deliberately unresolved.

James builds the whole novel around Isabel's interior life rather than external incident, most famously in a long night spent turning her marriage over in her own mind, and the technique marked a real departure from the more plot driven fiction around it. It moves slowly and rewards close attention to what characters do not say as much as what they do.