but surrounded by the objects of the culture she believes he represents, and a mother’s love and care for his supposedly motherless daughter. Half of the novel is given over to Isabel’s living with, adjusting to, and finally triumphing over that disastrous choice.

In his preface, James uses an architectural figure to describe The Portrait of a Lady. He says the “large building” of the novel “came to be a square and spacious house.” Much of what occurs in the novel occurs in or near a series of houses, each of which relates significantly to Isabel or to other characters. The action begins at Gardencourt, the tudor English country house of Daniel Touchett that Isabel finds more beautiful than anything she has ever seen. The charm of the house is enhanced by its age and natural setting beside the Thames above London. It contrasts greatly with the “old house at Albany, a large, square, double house” belonging to her grandmother, which Isabel in her childhood had found romantic and in which she had indulged in dreams stimulated by her reading.

Mrs. Touchett’s taking Isabel from the Albany house to Gardencourt is a first step in her plan to “introduce her to the world.” When Isabel visits Lockleigh, Lord Warburton’s home, she sees it from the gardens as resembling “a castle in a legend,” though inside it has been modernized. She does not view it as a home for herself, or its titled owner as her husband, despite the many advantages of both. The front of Osmond’s house in Florence is “imposing” but of “a somewhat uncommunicative character,” a “mask.” It symbolizes Osmond, behind whose mask Isabel does not see until after she is married to him. The last of the houses in The Portrait of a Lady is the Palazzo Roccanera, the Roman home of the Osmonds, which James first describes as “a kind of domestic fortress . . . which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence.” When Isabel later broods over it during her night-long meditation in chapter 42, it is “the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.”

Isabel is first seen at Gardencourt on her visit with Mrs. Touchett, and it is here that she turns down the first of three proposals of marriage. It is fitting that she should be last seen here with each of the three men who have loved her. Asserting the independence on which she has so long prided herself, she has defied her imperious husband by going to England to see the dying Ralph, whose last words tell her that if she is now hated by Osmond, she has been adored by her cousin. In a brief conversation with Lord Warburton after Ralph’s death, Isabel turns down an invitation to visit him and his sisters at Lockleigh. Shortly afterward, a scene from six years earlier is reversed: Then she had sat on a rustic bench at Gardencourt and looked up from reading Goodwood’s letter (in which he writes that he will come to England and propose to her) to see and hear Warburton preparing to propose. Now Goodwood surprises her by appearing just after she has dismissed Warburton.

There follows the one sexually passionate scene in the novel. In it Isabel has “an immense desire to appear to resist” the force of Goodwood’s argument that she should leave Osmond and turn to him. She pleads with streaming tears, “As you love me, as you pity me, leave me alone!” Defying her plea, Goodwood kisses her, but he possesses her for a moment only. Immediately after, she flees into the house and then to Rome, as Goodwood learns in the brief scene in London with Henrietta Stackpole that closes the novel. James leaves the reader to conclude that Isabel’s love for Pansy Osmond has principally determined her decision to continue enduring a marriage that she had freely—though so ignorantly and foolishly—chosen.