If Henry James had allowed the perversity he merely suggests in his writings actually to appear, he might have written [La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria] by José Donoso. Instead of Isabel Archer's passage from innocence to experience in Portrait of a Lady, we would see her innate corruption emerge as she became more deeply immersed in a corrupt world. There would be no innocence, only ignorance; and the hypothetical Isabel Archer's education would lead her from solitary narcissism to a sexual chaos devoid of rules or love, animated by passions and the need to satisfy them.

La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria is that text. It traces the life of Blanca Arias: her marriage to an adorable but impotent marqués, her widowhood of barren sexuality, and her "mysterious disappearance." Although he set the novel in early twentieth-century Madrid, Donoso has...