She is set in a pleasant garden landscape.

Twice Browning tries to get more out of her and to lift her into reality.

But the men carry him away from her, and she remains undrawn.

These mere images, with the exception of the woman in _Porphyria's Lover_, who, with a boldness which might have astonished even Byron but is characteristic of Browning in his audacious youth, leaves the ball to visit her lover in the cottage in the garden--are all that he had made of womanhood in 1837, four years after he had begun to publish poetry.
It was high time he should do something better, and he had now begun to know more of the variousness of women and of their resolute grip on life and affairs.

So, in _Sordello_, he created Palma.