The Art of Being Found Out
Colm Tóibín: The need to be revealed, 20 March 2008
“...  much they know now; how little they knew before. What is astonishing is how close Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond have come to keeping their secret. If you trace Madame Merle’s emotional position in the novel rather than Isabel’s, the movement of her feeling is as interesting and as intense. It is close to that of Lady Gregory when she sent the sonnets to ... ”