Synopses & Reviews
This brilliant satire of the women's rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena's heart and remove her from the limelight?
"The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James," writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction. "It is about idealism in a democracy that is still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals...[written] with a ferocious, precise, detailed and wildly comic realism."
Review
"As devastating in its wit as it is sharp in its social critique of sexual politics. No writer in America had dared the subject before. No one has done it so well since." The New Republic
Synopsis
Henry James' celebrated novel about a passionate New England suffragette, her displaced southern gentleman cousin, and a charismatic young woman whose loyalty they both wished to possess goes so directly to the heart of sexual politics that it speaks to us with a voice as fresh and as vital as when the book was first published in 1882. Majestic in its movement, rich and sympathetic in its ironies, The Bostonians is the work of a master psychologist at the top of his form.
About the Author
A. S. Byatt is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and reviewer. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, and the quartet The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman.
Reading Group Guide
1. “I wished to write a very
American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions,” wrote Henry James in one of his Notebooks. How would you describe the social and political climate in New England as depicted in
The Bostonians? Consider the profound effects of the recently ended Civil War, as well as the changes wrought by an increasingly industrial society.
2. In A. S. Byatts Introduction, she notes that Henry James was raised in a progressive, transcendentalist household, and that he was “able to report the phantasmagoria of spiritual and political abstractions, magnetisms, and influences, with a surefooted realist solidity of specification . . . because it is what he knew best and first. . . . The characters even the southerner, Basil Ransom- are people James was at ease with, could represent economically, precisely, and with wit.” Do you agree? Which of the characters described by Mrs. Luna as “witches and wizards, mediums, and spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals” stand out as the most fully realized? Do any of them strike you as caricatures?
3. According to Alison Lurie, “The central conflict in The Bostonians is over who will have possession of Verena. Because she is naive and passive, her own wishes have little to do with the outcome.” Do you agree? Consider the various characters who battle to control the beautiful young orator: Olive Chancellor, Basil Ransom, the Tarrants, Mr.Burrage and his mother, and Matthias Pardon. How do their motives differ, and what does Verena represent to each of them?
4. Writing about The Bostonians, Irving Howe praises “James affectionate rendering of places and scenes. The elegance of Olive Chancellors drawing room, the dinginess of the Cambridge street in which the Tarrants live, the glimmering mildness of Cape Cod in the summer . . . The musty mumbling circle of reformers meeting, and sagging, in Miss Birdseyes rooms . . .” After reading Jamess satirical masterpiece, which scenes and locales strike you as the most vivid and memorable?
5. In Chapter 5, James writes that Olive “knew her place in the Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder supposed; so that there was a want of perspective in talking to her as if she had been a representative of the aristocracy. . . . Olive Chancellor seemed to herself to have privileges enough without being affiliated to the exclusive
set and having invitations to the smaller parties, which were the real test.” Can you find other examples of a defined social hierarchy in The Bostonians? How would you compare Olives views on class structure with the social aspirations-or lack thereof-of Mrs. Luna, Miss Birdseye, Dr. Prance, and Mrs. Tarrant?
6. Much has been written about the closing line of The Bostonians: “It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which [Verena] was about to enter, these were not the last [tears] she was destined to shed.” What do you imagine the future holds for Verena, Basil, and Olive?
7. When The Bostonians was first published, in 1886, it was deemed a critical and commercial failure in America. Why do you think Jamess nineteenth-century contemporaries found the novel so distasteful? Was it the authors colorful characterization of the womens suffrage movement or his depiction of a “Boston marriage” between Olive and Verena? Was it his depiction of a bitter struggle between a northerner and a southerner, so soon after the Civil War? As a modern reader, did you find the authors satirical portrait of the womens suffrage movement or Basil Ransoms antifeminist arguments offensive? Are the viewpoints expressed in the novel still relevant today?