When last we heard from Isabel Archer, she was on her way from London back to Rome, where her husband, the cruel, cosmopolitan aesthete Gilbert Osmond, was waiting. That’s how Henry James wrote it, anyway. Recall, if you will, the outline of The Portrait of a Lady: a spirited young woman from Albany, New York, arrives in England, inherits sixty thousand pounds, rejects two suitors, and, catastrophically, marries a third. In short order, Isabel, who had possessed “a certain nobleness of imagination” and whose ideal had been “the free exploration of life,” is ground down in “the house of…