Notes

Chapter 4 is important as one of the central chapters of the novel for describing Isabel Archer alone and thoughtful, as she is about to experience a very big change in her life. She is sitting alone in her room on a rainy evening pondering the life she has led so far and feeling restless about the changes that are about to take place. This scene gives Henry James a further opportunity of describing Isabel Archer. The narrator relates that "Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window." She is not used to holding her imagination back, but she pays for this in moments when she wants to exercise judgment instead of imagination. In those moments, she "paid the penalty of having given undue encouragement to the faculty of seeing without judgment." Here, James lays the foundation for his character portrait of Isabel Archer. She is well-read, but not well-disciplined in her thinking. She is impulsive. She wants to leave the past behind and start fresh. She has very romantic notions about Europe culled probably from all her books. She doesnÂ’t seem to have any desire to marry as we see by her rejection of Goodwood.

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