The Portrait of a Lady

First published in 1881, this novel follows Isabel Archer, a young American who comes to England with a hunger for experience and a dislike of being managed. After inheriting a fortune she travels to Italy and, against the advice of her cousin Ralph Touchett and the journalist Henrietta Stackpole, marries Gilbert Osmond, an American aesthete living in Florence with his daughter Pansy. The plot turns on how Osmond and the enigmatic Madame Merle use Isabel's money and independence, and on the limited choices left to her once she sees the marriage clearly. The book is a novel of courtship and confinement among transatlantic expatriates, not a biography of a painter.

Bound in brown cloth with a lily motif in green, yellow and gold by Daniel Norman. Yellow endleaves. Grey-green slipcase.