She certainly looks that way, here.
Who was she? The wife of a friend, perhaps? There are a series of poems based on a character by that name. Turns out Sargent was friends with humorist Max Beerbohm, who was working on a contemporary novel by that title, about a woman by that name whose beauty was so great that her merely stepping off a train to visit her grandfather in Oxford caused men to obsess over her -- to the point of committing mass suicide.
This Sargent painting and Beerbohm's novel might have been the very first product cross-promotion -- multi-platforming in its earliest form.
More than likely, it was Sargent's way of jibing Beerbohm -- payback for the latter's caricutures of the revered painter.
Notice the subject's eyebrows are just one wave of black paint. Sargent's downward point-of-view is filled with realistic shadowing. The grass is a riot of green, blue and yellow hues which play tricks on the mind: we envision individual blades of grass, and dappled sunlight.
I love that he caught her reading. Is Proust? Dickens? Baudliere? Possibly The Works of Max Beerbohm.
Art is fun, and can be funny, too,
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