The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)

On a long English lawn at Gardencourt, three men take afternoon tea and a young American woman walks toward them with the whole of her life still unspent, certain she will not let anyone choose it for her. Isabel Archer has a fortune she did not seek, a mind that refuses every easy comfort, and two suitors any sensible woman would take; she sends them both away and gives herself instead to Gilbert Osmond, a connoisseur of beautiful objects who has decided she is one. Henry James writes her ruin so slowly you feel the air going out of the rooms. Then, in a single midnight chapter, he sits her alone before a dying fire and lets her trace, thought by thought, exactly how a free woman talked herself into a locked house. The terrible tenderness of the book is that it never once lets you stop loving her for it; her ruin is made entirely of her own best qualities, her courage, her refusal to be saved.