3 - The Fatherless Heroine and the Filial Son: Deep Background for The Portrait of a Lady

Summary

AMONG the many ways of summing up Isabel Osmond's earlier life there is one that goes like this:

The late Mr. Archer, indulgent and affectionate, provided his favorite daughter with numerous advantages, the chief of which was not to bring her up too strictly. But he was somewhat irresponsible, and once, when Isabel was in her eleventh year (thirteenth in the serial version), he left her in Switzerland with a French maid, who then ran off with a Russian. A sturdy adventurer even then, the girl was quite certain there was no cause to worry or feel deserted.

Now in her early twenties, her father having died, Isabel has grown up to be a remarkably independent young woman who seems ready and eager to take on the world. Only, for the time being, she has secluded herself in a remote room of the same house where her father died. She is undergoing a harsh Prussian discipline, forcing her mind “to advance, to halt, to retreat.” Mostly retreat, it would seem, for while “the large number of those to whom he owed money” feel that Mr. Archer got what he deserved in his early, unhappy death, Isabel naively worships the “handsome, much-loved father. … It was a great good fortune to have been his daughter; Isabel was even proud of her parentage” (Chap. 4).

At Gardencourt Isabel is lively and alert and appears to have outlived her bereavement, but she is still wearing black – “more than a year” (Chap. 2) after Mr. Archer's death. (Later, after her child dies, she discards her mourning within six months [Chap. 39].)