The Portrait of a Lady
Isabel Archer is left a fortune and told she is free, and then makes a choice that the reader can see is a mistake long before she does. James follows her from Albany to Florence to Rome, and the novel's suspense is not whether she will be happy but whether she will understand what has been done to her.
The famous chapter in which she sits alone and reviews her marriage is one of the great passages of psychological fiction. James revised the novel heavily for the New York edition, and the later version is denser and colder. Either text will do; the central situation is the same.
Public-domain status
First published in 1881. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Henry James died in 1916, so this work has been free to republish there since 1987.
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