I really enjoyed this deep-dive into American society, especially the feminist movement, with James doing a great job at exploring the conflict between the old values of America and the news values exploding into society. Not only this, but the protagonists’ conflicts explored the North/South historical divide and the way it was presented in all aspects of society. My favourite element was how greatly dislikeable all the characters were. Normally, this would not work for me and I would get bored or frustrated. However, the way they were presented really aided the plot and fully explored the conflicts of the time in a perfect way.

My issue with this novel lies in the plot. At times it was repetitive and boring, with nothing really happening or moving forward. Furthermore, although I liked the characters, some minor ones fell flat and led me out of the story. Finally, the final plot point at the ending felt really unsatisfactory and disappointing - I was expecting a lot more!

TW: controlling nature, love triangle, exploitation, misogyny

This early novel of James's is an archly comedic, wry study of post-Civil War (white) gender politics in the U.S., rooted in the conflict between a misogynist Southern gentleman and a Boston lesbian (unstated but clear) feminist over a very attractive probably bisexual redhead with remarkable powers of speech. Can't get over how funny this was, so full of shade! Read/discussed via Skype book club with Liza.

This is my least favorite Henry James book. It's merely very good, not genius like Portrait of a Lady or Washington Square, not great like The Golden Bowl or The American, whch are both somewhat flawed but still brilliant. I think that I liked this book less because I felt that James didn't respect any of his own main characters or take them seriously, even though they are deadly serious about themselves. There are some exceptions in the minor characters -- Miss Birdseye, Dr. Prance, Mrs. Burrage. Those people are interesting and ultimately respected by James, and they are the ones who made the book fun for me, whereas the main characters -- Olive, Basil and Verena -- are all sneered at in different ways: Olive for being cold, man hating and blindly dedicated to her cause in a way that is more about obsession than reform; Basil for being a reactionary, a business failure and a scion of the South; and Verena for being an empty windbag, perhaps beautiful, charismatic and blessed with the gift of the blarney, but totally lacking in substance, ultimately just a silly goose. It fits these shallow characters that the book winds down to a comic opera finale, but the ending is unworthy of the genius of Henry James.

I have read that some early reviewers disliked the book not only for mocking Boston reformers, but also for being too sympathetic to the reactionary Southerner. Obviously none of these people came from the South. Basil is as much of a caricature as Olive. His philosophies and his aspirations are moronic. I felt that he was as mocked and disrespected by James as Olive was.

Another slightly troubling Henry James novel! Number nine in my chronological read-through of James's novels plus a few of his novelettes. **Spoiler Alert**

OK, first of all let's get the political out of the way. Certainly the triumvirate of Elon Musk, Trump, and Ayn Rand have pretty much proven that conservatism is not only not an ideology, but is best defined as the complete and total lack of ideology, that is to say, as pure selfishness. Musk (and every other conservative rich person) falls to the right because they think their wealth makes them more important than the rest of us and thus their selfishness is somehow justified--hence Musk, a dude with no discernible talent outside of making money out of money, believes he should be educating us on social issues, deciding the outcomes of wars, and planning to move the human race to Mars. Trump is the con man who falls right in order to gain riches by exploiting the bigotries and prejudices of the ignorant. Rand tried to make all of this pure cynicism and selfishness into something that looks like an ideology when its at best a strategy for domination and wealth accumulation. But let's be real: true ideology is the selflessness of soldiers (Trump's "suckers"), woke idealist thinkers and community builders (who Musk would warn us against), and the justice seekers whose rules curbing tyranny Rand would have us believe are the real tyrants.

Since I'm going to read this novel with this belief system my reading is going to be perhaps a bit particular.

The novel is the tragedy of the biological over the ideological and how our best social impulses can be easily swept away by the biological impulse to reproduce and the gross selfishness that we feel doing so entitles us. (This is why the family clan is the linchpin of all conservative institutions like the Roman Empire and the later catholic Church--even when Jesus himself seems to have been at best indifferent to the clan.) Thus I see the novel's literal plot as an ideological fight over the loyalties of Verena by Olive (who represents ideological social service) and Basil (representing selfish reproduction/submission to patriarchal power). Olive is the Bostonian longtime abolitionist turned feminist and Basil the Southerner with conservative beliefs--really only an ironic lack of any sort of idealism. The novel's last line (and its whole final chapter, which I imagine informed the final scene of The Graduate) lets love triumph, but does say that love is at least equally a cause of tears as it is for joy so I take the novel as quite a bit less one-sided as many critics have in the past. Like Virgil's Aeneid, which simultaneously glorifies war and bemoans the tragedy of war, I think The Bostonians tries to evoke this struggle between ideology and selfishness without taking sides. It's maybe the only novel ever where the triumph of love is tragic as it trumps common sense and ideological behavior for what can only be a doomed marriage.

At least the Basil Ransom character, I thought, was villainous throughout. Other critics think the novel is on his side somehow because he's charming, but I found him consistently clueless and phony, exactly like most conservatives, puffed up that their cynicism makes them superior thinkers because they don't have to do anything (make any sacrifices) about it since it's all based on selfishness. It makes them feel superior and they act it. I don't think he's charming to anyone but Verena and even she seems to know in her heart of hearts that she shouldn't like him at all.

It's really interesting then that Olive, whose political passion seems also to be informed by her lesbianism (of course never directly addressed--I've said in another review that the characters of 19th century fiction are like Barbie dolls, without genitalia, and all sexual desires are coded as "passion" "marriage" and "love making," which is more rightly termed wooing). To me Olive is the much better logical choice for Verena but, as I think we all know from experience, we're often sexually attracted to people to whom we're otherwise indifferent and even sometimes despise. For Verena, Basil is surely one of those people. Thus it's truly sad that biological imperative makes her chose Basil over the far more simpatico choice of Olive, with whom she has so much in common intellectually, but with whom, alas, she has no desire to copulate.

To me there were times when I thought that the novel was pushing me toward the conservative viewpoint as James cannot hep but endlessly point out the little hypocrisies of the various progressive characters here--Olive's wealthy upbringing and fetishization of the poor, etc. And these are indeed flaws of so many progressives, our condescending attitude when we try to free people so mired in religious superstition and Fox News propaganda that they hate us for wishing them well. I am embarrassed by these things but long ago realized that the conservative points them out only to fuel their own cynical stance that since there is no good in goodness we might as well all be bigoted assholes. Thus, in this, the novel's narrator leans toward the conservative viewpoint.

But what changed my mind on this was the Ms. Birdseye character.

In the novel's opening scenes she is a bit ridiculed, yet her absolute selflessness shines through. Later, when Ransom comes face-to-face with her a second time she's practically Christ-like in her goodness and desire to convert him and it effects him--while he will not be converted, he still feels her goodness and is touched. He, himself, however, is never kind in the novel, only polite, like the Southern Gentleman he is--the only thing standing between him and the jungle is social conformity, which has nothing at all to do with compassion but only a cynical adherence to rules to save us from endless mutual destruction in the rat race conservatives believe the world to be.

On to The Princess Casamassima.

I thought I had to read this at last, although it is seldom I have approached a novel with such trepidation, or dodged its bullet for so many years. When I did read it, I needed to pause for a few weeks before the last 60 pages -- until I ceased to care/had the emotional distance not to be enraged. Life's too fraught at present to infuriate yourself unnecessarily.

So was it what I expected/feared? Not altogether. For most if not the entirety of the novel it was possible to read around Henry James and see Olive as one like her might have been in real life, rather than believe the author's commentary.

In this novel, as no doubt you know, Henry James punches down at feminists, abolitionists, and other social justice activists contemporary to him. It is not that the conservative antagonist to them, Basil, who writes reactionary opinion pieces out of step with his day's newspapers and cannot get them published (until he does, which gives him confidence to propose conservative marriage to the other half of Olive's Boston marriage) -- it is not that Basil is written to win a reader's heart or his argument with us. James is nowhere that direct. But Basil is not ridiculed by the text as Olive is, and he proves Verena's commitment to feminism shallow, a fallacy.

I've been aware of this novel ever since I read about 'Boston marriages' between women in Surpassing The Love Of Men: Romantic Friendship And Love Between Women From The Renaissance To The Present. To my disappointment the lesbian suggestions are frail (I know other 19th century novels by big names that have a less diluted lesbian content). Boston marriages are not seriously treated here, and this can't be said to be a portrait of one, even a hostile portrait.

Positives: readability. Suspense. I found James' style in this one as breezy as he ever gets, in my experience. In spite of everything above, perversely, I very much enjoyed reading it (importantly, with that pause for serenity so I wouldn't tear out the final pages with my teeth).

Still, I did often wonder to myself why I am spending my precious time reading a take on late 19th century American feminists by a person so out of touch with them -- from a position of ignorance. Style? Yes, yes, James' style. Ask yourself whether it's worth it. I should have said, no.

Five stars? One star? Oh, either is true. But it's getting one for the record, because content matters.

While certainly not his very best, The Bostonians is far from the least successful of the novels Henry James published. With its cast of (mostly) overwrought characters, and its powerful evocation of environment (post-Reconstruction Boston, late-Victorian Manhattan, and pre-pre-Kennedy Cape Cod), there is plenty to engage the patient reader. This is James, after all, so Patience remains a requirement if one is to wade through the ocean of discursive, tangential prose that is his trademark. I mostly enjoyed the swim.

The most interesting aspect of this story is the interface between the fictional world created by James and the non-fictional society that inspired it. Learning that Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Annie Adams Fields, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other historical figures - and their sociopolitical causes - had informed his narrative choices sent me down many rabbit holes, mostly to my benefit. I suspect I would have liked this book less had it not been built upon such intriguing premises. As it was, despite liking very few of the characters and finding certain scenes cringeworthy, this was a worthwhile endeavor.

Finally, I was brought up short when I realized that the concept of a Boston Marriage is now obsolete. Marriage is marriage in most of the civilized world, and Olive would have been just as miserable married to Verena as Verena will soon find herself to be married to Basil.

Although this book took me a long time to read, I did definitely enjoy it. The Bostonians is about the women's rights movement and a woman named Verena Tarrant who is a key part of this movement. Henry James develops his characters beautifully and realistically, and although I wasn't really sure which character I was supposed to sympathize with, I still enjoyed reading about each of the characters and hearing their side of the story. Some sections of the book were a little slow-going, big blocks of text with no dialogue, but for the most part, it was an enjoyable and interesting read. :)

Over the past few years I have read a number of Henry James' late novels, ones where the long sentences snake around their meanings but never quite grasp them in their coils; ones where the process of reading feels like walking in a mist within a fog. It was almost a relief to read one of his earlier works and The Bostonians is a novel of refreshing clarity: you know where you stand with early James. It is a beautifully constructed work, but it certainly isn’t a ‘page turner’. If the novelist’s main two tasks are to push forward a narrative while exploring the characters, James sacrifices the former for the sake of the latter. But the characters are wonderful, a complexity of character traits that evolve through the novel, often demanding that we shift our responses. The Bostonians begins with a Jamesian ‘culture clash’, but here it is not between his usual American and European, but between Basil Ransom, a Southerner, and his distant cousin Olive Chancellor, a Bostonian. The differences aren’t just geographical: he is a conservative, an old style reactionary, she a radical, involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Olive takes Basil to a political meeting where he is entranced by the speaker Verena Tarrant – Verena is the third Jamesian character, the ‘natural’ woman, not quite an ‘innocent’, as some of his characters are, but one whose natural character contrasts with the world of social convention and good manners that dominates Society. Verena becomes Olive’s protégé, planning a future of feminist public speaking, but the drama of the novel is that she is also attracted to Basil who wants to save her from the vulgarities of the public world and her ridiculous ideas, i.e., he wants her as his wife. At the first political meeting we share Basil’s position as outsider and the tone is one of satiric irony, the radicals varying between odd to ghastly, but the beauty of the Jamesian method is shown in the way characters aren’t necessarily fixed, often developing in unexpected ways and leaving the reader with a certain freedom to respond in a variety of ways (although Verena’s parents and the opportunistic journalist don’t get beyond their first caricatures). This is shown clearly in the development of Miss Birdseye who is first shown as a very limited character, a small person living a small life, but as we get to know more about her, about her good nature and her past as an Abolitionist before the Civil War, the more sympathetic and admirable she seems, our response radically shifting – although, notably, Basil Ransom’s response to her also shifts. Verena is the least fixed of the characters, identified with the radical Bostonian milieu, but attracted to Ransom’s ideals of old fashioned Southern chivalry and it is her development that probably demands the greatest emotional response from the reader: the novel is constructed so we can take sides or have mixed feelings towards her choice for a possible future. Of the three central characters Olive is the least interesting – or she becomes less interesting as she develops. Initially there are interesting tensions between her belief in democracy and her privileged social position and education – she wants to be egalitarian but has problems not looking down on her ‘social inferiors’. But towards the end she becomes increasingly shrill. We can, of course, wonder about her ‘real’ or unconscious motivations behind her relationship with Verena: her intense feelings seem to go way beyond a shared political mission and the realist method of the novel, where we respond to the characters as though we were being presented with accounts of ‘real’ people, allows us to construct, for instance, motivations based on sexual attraction that are censored both by Olive and Henry James. But there is a central problem about The Bostonians for the modern reader (although here I am writing as a western European): I have mentioned James’s ironic tone, but there is a further irony in the novel, one that can be called the irony of history – the modern reader probably doesn’t react to the characters and situations in the way James expected, just because of social changes that have occurred over the past 130 years. The radical milieu of the political meeting, for instance, is one of spiritualism, vegetarianism and support for women’s suffrage: the tone of the novel takes these as oddities that the cultured person wouldn’t take seriously, but today attitudes are different. Personally I would still take spiritualism as putty brained, but I consider vegetarianism as a normal and it would be difficult to find anyone who admitted opposition to women’s suffrage. James seems much closer to Basil than Olive, but while some readers might be charmed by Basil’s chivalry, most will be alienated by his contempt for democracy: contempt for democracy is not an acceptable 21st Century attitude. The conventions of the Nineteenth Century novel might, for instance, push the reader to hope for the creation of the romantic couple, hope that Verena chooses Basil, but many people today, including myself, will respond with a certain dread to the idea that she will give up her ideals and become the dutiful wife to such a reactionary. Basil Ransom’s problem is that history is against him. Of course, one of the great beauties of the finest realist novels is that there is room to read against the novelist: we can find ourselves in a sort of dialogue with the author, disagreeing with explicit meanings or arguments of the novel, but still finding room to engage with the characters and narrative: there is room to construct a sort of counter-novel, a novel that disagrees with the novelist. But I am not sure that this is possible with The Bostonians. Henry James is always a brilliantly detailed novelist, creating works of astonishing intricacy, but his brilliance can be a little narrow: his is a very bright light shining on a very small world and I wonder if this narrowness leaves no room for disagreement. Maybe disagreement would be seen as poor manners.

Henry James is a great writer and I enjoyed "The portrait of a lady", "The turn of the screw" and other of his works, but not very much this one.
It was unbelievably slow, with the use of reported speech instead of the dialogues in the first half, and it took me an effort to finish it.
The story is not bad: Verena Tarrant, a young and naive woman who's good at speak in public, becomes the object of obsession of two cousins. Olive, who believes in women emancipation and hates man, would like her to become a leader of the movement; Basil, who thinks that women's place is the domestic hearth, wants to have her only for himself.
So starts a struggle between the two strong wills to control Verena.
It's very psychological and sometimes I enjoyed it, but the ending disappointed me.

It is a shame, but not so great a one, that we become stereotypes when we talk politics or fall in love. This novel is sort of about that: progressives and conservatives of a lovingly depicted time and place (1870s Boston) misread and criticize one another, follow some strange goals under the guise of yet others, and grapple with the possibility of liking someone whilst detesting their opinions. As compared to The Portrait of a Lady, this book trades psychological depth and an austere tone for social bravura and charm, which is by no means to say it remains on the surface of its subjects.

category (?): published before 1900

finally finished this book!!! i can’t believe it took me almost a month. it was a very nonlinear progression. the beginning of the book, honestly almost the entire first Book (the bostonians was originally published as a serial and in my copy at least was organized into three books) slogged on for so long. i honestly can’t imagine reading it as a serial. i feel like almost every week i would’ve been disappointed at how little happened. but ! there were definitely some shenanigans and funny descriptions even in this first bit.

the book finallyyyy picks up around halfway through. i also by this point got more used to the writing style so that probably helped some. i will say i did genuinely laugh out loud at certain parts! and you really get invested towards the end!

the ending (no spoilers) annoyed me, but in a way where i could accept that that was where the book was leading anyway. i understand that it’s a satire, and that realism was big at the time, but reading this at the time probably would’ve made me so sad. it’s just kinda cynical and demoralizing? (((i don’t want to go into too much detail because spoilers but yeah))) HOWEVER as a lens into the time period? so interesting ! to see the discussion of the post civil war era, especially with one of the main characters being from mississippi and the main settings of boston (duh) and new york. i liked seeing the discussions of feminism, and the different kinds of femininity we see, and i gotta give credit where credit is due—this book basically invented the term “boston marriage” so… happy pride month!

speaking of boston: i loved seeing the areas and community of boston and massachusetts depicted here! it was really fun to hear about the back bay, the cape, and even central mass!

overall: 3.5⭐️! do i recommend? if you want to read it and feel comfortable reading an older style of writing, go ahead! but if you don’t want to, you’re not missing out on too much!

Bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak. My god the assessment of the powers of incendiary liberation in the face of tyrannical traditionalism is bleak as hell, and while we've certainly progressed beyond such a pitiful stage in gender equity, it is troubling that the attitudes and the logics in this book are by no means unfamiliar to a 21st century reader. Discerning, scorching, compassionate, it is a book which I think will stay with me, but which I am very glad to escape. Poor Olive: mightily imperfect, but heroic to the end.