“I think now that perhaps I was not understood then—not really seen. Yet I could be still.”

Isabella looks back on her life and legacy. Her desire to be fully known and understood functions as a framework and rationale for the novel: Through historical fiction, writers can explore the inner emotions and motivations of public, historical figures.

“I have come to believe we all have one love story, and this is mine: my house and all my different selves inside it.”

Isabella summarizes her life’s work: She constructed Fenway Court (later renamed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and filled it with an exceptional collection of art and decorative objects. Her musings foreshadow the novel’s eventual conclusion, in which she will achieve her life’s purpose by collecting art and making it available for the public to view.

“Since marrying, I tried always to make myself appear smaller.”

Early days of her marriage, Isabella tries to fit into Boston high society. She knows that her outspokenness and strong opinions do not conform to expectations of how she should behave as the young bride of a wealthy man. She uses the image of physical size to describe her attempts to restrain and restrict her innate personality.