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Lord Warburton seemed quite ready to walk, to sit or to do anything that Isabel should propose, and he gave her this assurance with his usual air of being particularly pleased to exercise a social virtue. But he was, nevertheless, not in command of his emotions, and as he strolled beside her for a …

[...] It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself; you could have made her colour, any day in the year, by calling her a rank egoist. She was always planning out her development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress. Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-lik…

[...] Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others esthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in the depths of her nature an even …

Mrs Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters, and was usually thought the most sensible; the classification being in general that Lilian was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the ‘intellectual’ superior. Mrs Keyes, the second of the group, was the wife of an officer of the United Sta…

It may seem strange to speak of such a book in tragic terms, when it is, after all, only the commonplace story of a misjudged union and an unhappy marriage, yet it is precisely James’s treatment of his subject which raises a trivial episode to tragic heights. In the preface he compares Isabel with …