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 Portia, but I wonder whether the Duchess of Malfi would not be a better comparison from the great age of English tragedy. For James’s insistence on Isabel’s private consciousness of her plight as the central issue can easily obscure her status as a public spectacle, the image of the suffering woman who, in Aristotelian manner, falls from prosperity to adversity in a reversal of fortune brought about by her own blindness, while the chorus looks on and supplies a commentary.