The Portrait of a Lady: Introduction by Peter Washington

Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence that is at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characters with whom she is entangled—the good man and the evil one, between whom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom she must do battle—are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggests dazzling imaginative powers. ...