Summary
Isobel wakes up and finds that she is staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. As she looks at a ceiling stain, she remembers the night before, when she had been yelled at and thrown out of a literary gathering by a woman named Kate. A young man named Michael had followed Isobel out of Kate's premises, talking to her and eventually inviting her back to his place. This is where Isobel finds herself. Michael wakes up and clearly has little patience for Isobel's presence; Isobel inspects Michael's bookcase and decides to steal one of the books, Words of the Saints, that she notices. While Michael is in his bathroom, Isobel snatches the volume. She heads out into the street, reflecting on some of her past diversions (such as making bizarre, intense phone calls to complete strangers) but feeling euphoric to be out and experiencing the world.
Soon enough, Isobel returns to her room, which she mostly keeps in a state of messiness and disrepair. She begins cleaning, and notices an irritating flap of wallpaper, which she contemplates covering with a panel of embroidery. This idea brings to mind Isobel's past, unpleasant experiences with embroidery: as a the student of a woman named Miss Harman, Isobel had been mocked for creating lavish and idiosyncratic flower designs. Despite such negative recollections, Isobel still feels drawn to embroidery. She rushes to a nearby store and returns with thread and embroidery designs, though she remains drawn to the book that she had taken from Michael. Yet when she opens the book, Isobel shifts quickly from the writings of one saint to those of another. She also finds herself thinking of her hometown, and decides to pay a visit that same day.
Isobel sets off after lunch. She arrives in her town by bus and inspects the red brick church that she had once attended. While the scene is deserted, Isobel is flooded with memories: visions of other children running after her, and a recollection of a youthful sensation of grace that descended upon her in church. She then feels that she is drawn to her former home, and follows the route that she had once taken home from school.
After Isobel reaches her old house, she hears a voice calling her name. At first, Isobel is inclined to run, but then realizes that she cannot escape the woman who is calling for her: Mrs Adams, an old neighbor. Mrs Adams invites Isobel to her house for some refreshments, then shows Isobel a memento that she has held onto. As a girl, Isobel had written a poem about Mrs Adams' cat, Smoke, and had seen it published in a newspaper. Mrs Adams is fond of the poem, but Isobel had been convinced that she had done something wrong by putting Mrs Adams' name in the newspaper. Isobel conveys these long-held qualms to Mrs Adams, who is surprised by Isobel's suspicions about the poem but then muses that they might have been inspired by Isobel's mother.
Upon leaving Mrs Adams, Isobel finds that she is on the verge of tears. Bad memories of her mother and even of her father return, as Isobel reflects on how cruel and ridiculous her parents had been in causing her to fear Mrs Adams. The young woman goes behind a rock; she gives way to an onslaught of tears and to powerful sobs. She realizes, now, that she is a writer. In fact, after composing herself, she decides to buy an exercise book and spend the rest of the day exploring her newfound role.
Isobel arrives back in her room with the exercise book and writes a short scene based on her recent excursions, which she gives the title "The Book is Gone." Here, Michael and a friend are imagined discussing the aftermath of Michael's one-night stand with Isobel; the young writer herself appears only indirectly, as a girl who is remembered sitting naked and reading Plato. Having completed some of her writing, Isobel then decides that she must send back the book that she took from Michael. She is sad to part with this item that accompanied her on the day's adventure, but reflects that words are now her "talismans."
Isobel returns to work soon after. The other young women in the import office ask how Isobel's weekend has been, and muse that Isobel has "met someone" when they notice Isobel's positive demeanor. As she settles in, Isobel joyously reflects that, indeed, she has "met someone."
Analysis
The final section of I for Isobel begins with several signs of alienation. Isobel's literary friends from "Glassware and Other Breakable Items" have more or less disappeared from the narrative, and Isobel herself has been kicked out of a social gathering, has an unfulfilling one-night stand, and returns home to a rented room where she is left almost completely to herself. Yet it may be wrong to take these elements of the narrative as negative: Isobel has after all disregarded contacts (the "special crowd") and authorities (Mrs Bowers) who did not make her feel welcome. What she is working towards, in fact, is a sense of self-expression that the presence of other people would only hinder. Her "lonely" room, after all, is the scene of her renewed enthusiasm over embroidery, then of her inaugural effort in her life as an adult writer.
A knowledge of how "I for Isobel" ends helps can help a careful reader (or re-reader) to see how carefully Witting has led up to Isobel's ultimate recognition of her literary calling. For instance, early in the section, Isobel regards the sleeping Michael: "She turned her head to look at him, remote in sleep: delicate sallow oblong face, fluted upper lip, light-brown crimped hair drifting across his forehead . . . Listen, you don't have to paint his portrait" (149). Isobel is already well aware of her predisposition to try to transform her surroundings into art, which she sums up as a "problem," since "Some people count lamp posts, I describe them" (149). One of her important discoveries about herself is that artistic observation and self-expression are not "problems," as authorities such as Miss Harman at one point led her to think; they are productive ways of viewing the world that demand unique outlets.
As much as Isobel values self-expression and emotional honesty, she is still haunted by her origins. Witting's final section returns Isobel quite directly to the world of religion that was more or less left behind in "Glassware and Other Breakable Items," confronting Isobel first with Michael's book and second with the sights of her hometown. Isobel is not necessarily attracted to Catholicism or to her old community; she does not want to reconnect, in any permanent way, with the lifestyles that they represent. Yet Isobel feels "guilty still" about the person she once was, mulling over the "skulking and the fear" that she had hoped to move beyond but hasn't (168). Her visit home is driven by a few different impulses—unpleasant school memories, the nagging presence of Michael's book, too much leisure time—but may, whether Isobel admits it to herself or not, most of all be an effort to finally exorcise the phantoms of Miss Harman, Isobel's mother, and Isobel's own helplessness.
Isobel's culminating realization—an especially touching one, after some of the conflicts and miseries previously associated with her upbringing—is that writing, even the writing of a child, can form meaningful bonds. For this realization, Isobel is indebted to Mrs Adams, who treasured Isobel's poem as a way of preserving her cat Smoke: "Dear old Smoke, he lived to be ten and I miss him still. I often think, it's the little poem that brings him back, more than the photograph. I was so pleased, I brought you a book to paste your poems in, and a snap of Smoke, but you used to run away whenever I called you" (175-176). Mrs Adams' interest in the poem is not based on the kind of high-culture aesthetic appreciation that Isobel's disregarded literary friends might have treasured; rather, the poem is valuable as a form of interpersonal connection, as a medium for sympathy. And the constructive relationship between reader and writer goes both ways here, since Isobel as a writer brings back Mrs Adams' memories while Mrs Adams as a reader encourages (or in any case wanted to encourage) Isobel's writing.
Without these insights, Isobel's sense of a writer's vocation may have remained incomplete. She would, of course, have known Trollope and Auden and Dostoevsky from her earlier readings, but without Mrs Adams' testimony she would not have fully grasped what such writing—or any writing of real emotional vitality—could accomplish. Isobel's own life as a writer is one of the central topics of Witting's next Isobel book, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop. For now, though, it is enough to know that Isobel has indeed "met someone" (181) who will be more important to her progress as a writer than Mrs Adams, or Michael, or the "special crowd," unexpectedly important though they all were: a newly self-aware and self-assured version of herself.
