Although not fabulously rich, she was wealthy enough to move to and fro between The Gilded Age in America and La Belle Époque in Europe.

After the end of her marriage, as a single woman she travelled widely in Europe becoming friendly with authors including Henry James and Sir Frederic Kenyon.

Her biography, published in 2018, points out the parallels between her life and that of several of the female protagonists in the earlier novels of a writer she knew well, Henry James, exemplified by Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.

[5][note 1] According to her biographer, Gottardo Pallastrelli, she appears melancholy, dreamy and hesitant – and pensive – likening the painting to Piero di Cosimo's Maria Maddalena.

[7] In London, very unusually for that time, she wore long oriental dresses, unlike the manner of American heiresses looking for an aristocratic husband.

[note 2] Caroline all her life was in rather frail health having problems with her lungs so she moved to the spa town of Cauterets in the Hautes-Pyrénées and then, next year, returned to Litchfield.

[11] Russell thought of her as "the ideal of young womanhood" and in her "I found liberalism in politics and religion, complete emancipation from vulgar prejudices, great culture and wide reading".

[13] The first stanza of "Vates Ignotus" is –[14][note 4] Ye gods that, from Olympus' height, Lean to the music of his lyre, Who binds the world in links of light, Consenting to the high desire That turns pure hearts to meet his fire, What time long shadows leave the grass, And heaven's clear echoes cloudward pass To swell his earth's responsive choir; Oscar Wilde reviewed Venetia Victrix in an article he wrote: "Three New Poets"[note 5] in the Pall Mall Gazette.

[17][note 6] One of the poems "Hymn to Persephone" was included in the 1996 anthology British Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Higonnet 1996) and has been discussed in relation to the mythological figure (Radford 2007).

[22] According to English law, a marriage could not be annulled on grounds of non-consummation before it had lasted three years[21][23] so in August 1894 Caroline went to court – her application was unopposed and a decree of nullity was made in October 1894 which became final in May 1895.

From these letters it is clear Fitzgerald mixed with both aristocrats and intellectuals – at a reception at her publishers in 1895, she met the eminent author Henry James and in the next year, they started writing to each other regularly.

[26] Fitzgerald travelled around Europe for extended periods of time visiting the major cultural cities, particularly admiring the architecture of Florence.

[27] In 1897, the cultural and intellectual environment of Rome intimidated her and when she met Max Müller, the German philosopher and orientalist, he told her his initial reaction had been the same.

She enthusiastically joined in with the project, carrying out some literary research, helping with selecting the letters and visiting Robert and Elizabeth's old haunts.

To illustrate the plane of criticism she could adopt, when Kenyon and Fitzgerald thought to collaborate on a possible biography of Robert Browning she wrote I agree with you in thinking that this begins at a later period than these proofs have reached, only confirms my view that Elizabeth Barrett Browning began to exist when she knew the greater poet – and I am glad you have kept so many of the really rather dull early letters, for they prove that and form a document beyond the scope of anecdotal memoire.

Shortly afterwards he went with Caroline's mother to a similar lecture given in London at the Royal Geographical Society given by her son Edward who was by then also a well-known mountaineer.

James and Fitzgerald wrote to each other more and more frequently with the writer encouraging her to pursue her friendship with De Filippi even though she still had an affectionate relationship with Karo.

[36] Since her childhood in America, Fitzgerald had remained close to the Peskovs, a cosmopolitan Russian family who owned a castle in Salzburg.

In 1903, with the Peskovs they travelled through Russia and the Caucasus to Turkestan including such places as Astrakhan, Bokhara, Samarkand and Tashkent and returning past the Black Sea and Crimea.

[37][38][39] De Filippi was to have gone on a 1906 expedition to the Rwenzori Mountains on the Uganda/Congo border, again led by Abruzzi, but Caroline was ill after the Turkestan tour so he stayed at home with her.

De Filippi wrote to his friend, the explorer Aurel Stein, that his life no longer made sense and that he was shattered.

[38] Moving between The Gilded Age and La Belle Époque, according to her biographer, Fitzgerald's life strikingly resembled that of some of Henry James's American female protagonists in his novels – Christina Light in Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Princess Casamassima (1886); the eponymous Daisy Miller (1878); Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1880) and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902).