I have read this before, I think a very long time ago, as I had forgotten most of the plot. Long, hard work, but brilliant.
The plot can be summarised, I was going to say briefly, but I am not sure about that. Isabel Archer, a young American girl, arrives in England accompanied by her aunt. She meets and is courted by an English aristocrat Lord Warburton (for reasons I have never fully understood, although it would have been a short book if she had accepted and married him), but Isabel wants to explore life and Europe so after a brief sojourn in Paris, she travels with her aunt to Florence.
There she is introduced by Madam Merle, a friend of her aunt, and to Gilbert Osmond, an enigmatic American ex-pat who is a widower with a young daughter. For reasons equally unclear to me, she marries him, much to the disapproval of her friends.
It transpires, after a lot of complex plot, that his first wife never gave birth and that the daughter is in fact the product of an affair with Madam Merle. Isabel returns to England as her cousin Ralph is dying of (tuberclosis?) and if anyone, he is the love of her life.
After his death, she rejects, for the third time, the advances of an American suitor and returns to Italy to (presumably) her duties as an unloved wife of the man who has simply taken advantage of her.
Brilliant.
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