I have slogged my way through this long, slow trainwreck of a book, and by the end - like most observers of trainwrecks - I was fascinated. That fascination, I admit, was some time coming. I enjoyed the first half of the book, but it wasn't until Isabel was actually married to her awful husband that it really started to come together for me. And - fascination or not - I am torn in my reaction to it... or at least to Isabel, and that's essentially the same thing. I want to have sympathy for her, because she's fundamentally a tragic figure who has let her illusions ruin her life, but my perception of her, by the end, is less a person and more an aesthetic: a beautiful image of delicate misery. One might as well feel sorry for a cloud. Except that's not quite true and not quite fair, because that wanting-to-have-sympathy is undermined by my rather fatalistic opinion that she's going back to her husband and a life not much changed. I don't know if it's that she lacks gumption or that she has it in spades and directs it all to prolonging her own unhappiness.

All I do know, by the end, is that I much prefer Henrietta Stackpole and I think she's bound to have a much happier life. And like Isabel, all by her own efforts.

Finally, this edition includes a preface written by James. It is absolutely glutinous. Pacing is clearly something that has passed him by entirely.