Critics (and presumably readers) have been tripping up on and debating the ending of The Portrait of a Lady since the novel first appeared in 1881: in those early days with unsophisticated perplexity and often impatience. Even the very sympathetic review by James's friend W. D. Howells in Century balks at James's leaving us ‘to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us’ before submitting to swallowing his treatment meekly: ‘We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction.’

In The Portrait James has constructed his impasse: the spirited Isabel in an impossible marriage, having made what feels like a terminal rupture in disobeying her husband and coming to England to be with her dying cousin, tempted momentarily by the renewed importunity of Caspar Goodwood. But he does not seem to have left us all the instructions for how we get out of it.