Henry James published The Portrait of a Lady in 1880-81. Isabel Archer, a young American woman of independent spirit and limited but genuine intelligence, arrives in England after inheriting a large fortune from her uncle, whose son Ralph has persuaded him to make the bequest specifically to see what Isabel will do with freedom and financial independence. What she does is marry Gilbert Osmond, an expatriate American aesthete living in Florence with his daughter Pansy, choosing him over the wealthy American Caspar Goodwood and the English lord Warburton, both of whom love her and could offer conventional security. The choice is catastrophic in ways that take James several volumes to document with his usual precision.
The novel's central irony is that Isabel, who values freedom above every other consideration, exercises her freedom to choose a form of imprisonment more complete than any of the conventional marriages she rejected would have offered. Osmond wants a wife the way he wants a well-chosen object: for display, for the reflection her taste and independence cast onto his carefully curated self-image. Madame Merle, his former mistress and Pansy's actual mother, has engineered the marriage for her own purposes. Isabel's recognition, in the famous chapter where she sits alone by her dying fire in the middle of the night, is rendered as an accumulation of perception that arrives at the truth without the novel quite saying it, because James has decided to render recognition through the character's consciousness rather than authorial summary.
The ending, Isabel returns to Rome rather than accepting Goodwood's offer of escape, has been read as tragedy, as failure of nerve, and as a free choice that the novel's terms allow to be valid. James revised the novel extensively in 1908, deepening Isabel's consciousness and making the ending even harder to read as either purely negative or positive. What the novel does throughout is treat the quality of a person's inner life as genuinely important and precisely observable, which was not a given in the fiction of 1881 and remains the most demanding thing it asks of its readers.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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