Notes

Here we are introduced more fully both to Mrs. Touchett and to Isabel Archer. The setting is Albany, New York, in IsabelÂ’s paternal grandmotherÂ’s house where she first encountered Mrs. Touchett. Thus in the first chapters of the book, James is careful to set up the American context of the expatriates in England, and later in Italy. The matriarch, Mrs. ArcherÂ’s house is as symbolically important to the novelÂ’s Themes as is the English country estate described in the first chapters. It is two houses built into one. It has two doors, and although only one is in operation, no one has bothered to close up the second one, it has an ample number of rooms, but the favorite room is the old, isolated room called the office where old furniture is kept. It is treated as a sort of provincial inn by Mrs. Archer, open all the time to her children and grandchildren. Mrs. Touchett calls it bourgeois and compares it unfavorably with homes in Florence. It is also the site of Isabel ArcherÂ’s education. It is here that she was given carte blanche to read whatever suited her fancy. She seems to have read purely out of interest with no one to push her in any direction. Her reading is by no means light. When she is interrupted by Mrs. Touchett, she has begun on the German philosophers.

Henry James obviously enjoyed drawing the portrait of Mrs. Touchett. She is a person who "might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased." Her manner isnÂ’t intrinsically offensive, the narrator relates, "it was just unmistakably distinguished from the ways of others." She is a plain-looking person who has few graces and little elegance, but who has "an extreme respect for her own motives" which she will explain if asked in the proper tone. Mrs. Touchett seems to have been a New Woman before they were called by this term. When her marriage to Mr. Touchett didnÂ’t suit her, she left him and moved to Venice. She is in New York to handle her investments, which are her own and have nothing to do with her husbandÂ’s fortune. Mrs. Touchett is one kind of independent woman.

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