No offense to Sonny Mehta, but his note about not needing to know Henry James before reading this felt like a lie. The writing is pleasant, but I felt like I started in the middle of a much larger story and nothing made sense. I might return to this after a thorough examination of the previous chapter.

I’m not sure that I would have embarked on this book had I known that the writing was going to be so colloquial and stultifying. I was intrigued enough to waddle on, though the quaint vocabulary terms were heavy handed and at some point I stopped looking them up on my Kindle. It was a trifle over-plotted to my taste, a few too many coincidental meet-ups.

That said, I enjoyed the story and especially liked Isabel. My goodness, to think a woman was expected to quietly endure situations like she faced alone, trying to make sense of the secrets, wondering who else knew them. She knew she was bumbling her way through and wished she had a mother-figure to ask for advice. She had no confidants other than Aunt Lydia who was certainly no fan of hers. When Isabel asked her aunt if she had been a great disappointment, she replied that she hadn’t been a great anything - “that’s the trouble. I expected more of you.”

But Isabel was made of sterner stuff than she or her aunt realized, and the final arrangement of her making was perfect justice, making me think of Sartre’s No Exit. Brilliant! The book closes with an inconclusive ending, just as in Portrait of a Lady, and comes full circle with Isabel again visiting Miss Janeway. Nevertheless, what needed to happen did happen. She was free and directing her own life, though it did feel that some of the joy had been wrung out of her in the process.

A rich and vivid imagining of the events following Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. The character of Isabel Osmond and tells what happened following the startling revelations at the end of the classic novel is the basis for this book. You will see many familiar characters in this book if you liked Portrait of a Lady.

Mr Banville must have had fun channeling Henry James. It certainly was fun to read with Isabel making horrible decisions, dithering and going on and on and on.