A very perverse novel. Brilliantly written - especially those last eighty pages set in Marmion. Brilliant evocations of a New England sleepy summer, of the sort I desperately miss in London now. But the tug of war between Olive and Basil over Verena - and ultimate defeat of one of the parties - paints a very bleak picture of human relationships and love. Love is obsession and control in this novel, and a young woman is the spoil to be won. It’s all rather demoralizing.

3.6/5. James is sometimes inscrutable and irritatingly so when he is, but at other times (that is, most of the time) he writes these long, winding, sentences, heavy with adjectives like a piece of velvet stitched up with diamonds. I want to live in some of those passages.

I really struggled with this book. After watching the movie I thought it would be worth a read but in the end I don't think it was.

I think the book is stylistically weak and poorly written, such that it was very hard to get into and a chore to read. On top of that the subject matter and plot are seriously lacking. The characters are all ridiculous, the dilemma is ridiculous, and the author seems to think it all ridiculous, so I struggled to care what happened.

I couldn't stand Ransom but Verena was not much better and the final showdown scene was completely ludicrous. This is the first James I've read - and I can't tell. Did he really think feminists at the time were just in need of a man to tell them their ideas were silly and then physically abduct them? But then he promises more tears are in store for Verena because she's been such an idiot.

Perhaps I am in a mood but the whole idea that - for centuries/millennia in literature and real life - women's lives were made or ruined by the only pseudo-choice they ever got to make, which was who to marry, with no information or freedom because they were financially dependent and could not explore their sexuality and interests at all just utterly enrages me. One boorish chauvinist sets her heart aflutter because he's tall and confident and wants her and instead of just dealing with that lust/excitement Verena throws her life's work away. Unless we're supposed to conclude that it wasn't her life's work because actually she was so malleable and weak that her only real characteristic was her hair colour. Ugh. How she allowed the final scene at the Music Hall to take place is beyond me - either she wanted to give the talk or she didn't (or she wanted to marry Ransom or she didn't). How could anyone *want* such a catastrophic ridiculous melodramatic scene and think that was a good time or way to make a major life decision? Ridiculous. And Olive's reaction was ridiculous too. A woman never got a woman back, not by begging on her knees. They all made me angry.

A very small mitigating factor is that I enjoyed the descriptions of Boston, New York and Cape Cod and the travel in and between them.

At first glance, The Bostonians is as impenetrable as a closed circle. Everything in the story seems designed to keep the reader out: there is little action and few characters the reader can care for, and the one or two interesting ones disappear from the narrative for long stretches. The background of the story, the rise of reform movements in the US in the nineteenth century, and specifically in the 'reform city' of Boston, has great potential, but is instead obscured by the personal dilemmas and odd agendas of the main character, the rather grim Olive Chancellor, whose smile, on the rare occasions it appears, is likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison. Spending a number of pages in Olive Chancellor's sole company might well be the lowest point of my Henry James reading season.

I'm always on the lookout for an angle I can use in a review, but though I persevered stoically with this book, I wasn't having much luck, hardly even finding a quote worth noting until I reached the half way point, page 180 to be exact, where I came across something that seemed to offer a generous angle—plus a quotable sentence that summed up my own situation very aptly: I was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured Basil Ransom, but it occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by flattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. The 'happy chance' that Ransom—and myself—had waited for so long was the reappearance of one of those interesting minor characters who'd disappeared from the narrative early on: Miss Birdseye. She stopped on the sidewalk, and looked vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles, which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a fat, rusty satchel, which hung low at her side, as if it wearied her.

Miss Birdseye reminded me of something I'd been noticing in other Henry James books: James never repeats a character. Every book has a large cast and I haven't once found myself thinking I'd met any of them before. He must have created hundreds of original characters, some of them minor admittedly, but all fully developed, all 'visible' to the reader. I'm almost tempted to create an inventory.

In this book alone, there's already quite a group, and their diversity, whether we warm to them or not, is impressive—and great material for a review. Early on we meet a mesmeric healer by the name of Selah Tarrant, a man with great ambitions in the area of Reform if he could but find a platform to promote them: his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not sufficiently effective.

Tarrant's daughter Verena is an 'inspirational' speaker on the rights of women, and the crux of the novel revolves around Verena's access to the publicity so valued by her father. Verena herself is quite a character, by turns both charismatic and off-putting. Her mother is equally odd, being horribly annoying and annoyingly ingratiating. Nothing I'd previously read by Henry James had prepared me for the Tarrant family.

Another of the characters on the campaign trail is the formidable Mrs Farrinder who refrains from stepping onto the platform unless she's guaranteed to meet resistance from the audience: “I only rise to the occasion when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry, when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an army. Then I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt on the eve of one of his great victories. I must have unfriendly elements—I like to win them over.”

Basil Ransom, Southern ex-plantation owner, does duty as the 'unfriendly element'. He is completely alien to the general philosophy of the Reformers and offers a sharp contrast to their zealotry. His reentering the narrative at the half way point, just before Miss Birdseye, was very welcome—his cynical view of the world added some necessary tension to the story.

A second 'unfriendly element' is Mrs Luna, Olive Chancellor's widowed sister. Viewed by Ransom, she appears sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was attractive and impertinent, especially the latter.
It might be fairer to give her a chance to speak for herself: I am glad I haven’t opinions that prevent my dressing in the evening!” she declared from the doorway. “The amount of thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of looking frivolous!”
Though she flits in and out of the story, and is generally more out than in, she's entertaining whenever she appears. In fact, she's a character right out of a restoration comedy, a younger version of Lady Wishfort.

Even in the case of characters who have only very slight roles, Henry James invests time and attention, as in the description of New Yorker Mrs Burrage who makes some brief but impressive appearances in the narrative. She was a woman of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather heavy, but disappointing this expectation by a quick, amused utterance, a short, bright, summary laugh, with which she appeared to dispose of the joke (whatever it was) for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant everything she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk, and even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details and parentheses; she was not continuous, but frequent, as it were, and you could see that she hated explanations, though it was not to be supposed that she had anything to fear from them.

Then there's Dr Prance, also a minor character, but one of my favourites. “Men and women are all the same to me,” Doctor Prance remarked. “I don’t see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither of them is up to the standard.” And on Ransom’s asking her what the standard appeared to her to be, she said, “Well, they ought to live better; that’s what they ought to do.” And she went on to declare, further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long been Ransom’s conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance, and he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi with a richness of compliment that made her turn her acute, suspicious eye upon him.
You have to love Dr Prance.

Thinking about the skill with which Henry James creates and describes his characters reminds me of something he wrote in the appendix to The Golden Bowl. He was referring to the decision by the publishers of the 1909 New York edition of his collected works, to include illustrations. He was clearly thrown by the suggestion that they wanted to add 'pictures by another's hand' to his own 'pictures': Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does it the worst of services, and may well inspire in the lover of literature certain lively questions as to the future of that institution..
The compromise reached in the end was for the illustrations to remain at the most small pictures of our stage with the actors left out.

He gives us the actors in detailed word pictures. There is no need for further illustrations.

A claustrophobic and tedious book that has little to offer the casual reader, this is a still-life of a novel with almost no plot, drama, or humor. Olive, Verena and Basil are drawn with microscopic attention to detail, but they are boring narcissistic characters with few illuminating qualities.

Miss Birdseye is the only vibrant character in the whole novel. The exchanges between her and Mr. Ransom are interesting and entertaining. There are exactly 4 such scenes.

Before starting the novel, I was looking forward to James' depictions of Boston in the late 19th century, but even this modest expectation was disappointed: James does not bother to draw any pictures here. This bloated novel is nothing but a protracted analysis of characters that stopped being interesting, controversial, scandalous, and contemporary about 100 years ago.

A shallow portrayal of pathetic people caught up in the selfish advancement of their own interests. Two self-absorbed individuals vie for the affections of and control over an enchanting prophetess. As with many of Henry James works, this one also focuses on the movement afoot in the late 1800s regarding the emancipation of women. The substance of the movement is not discussed, only the forces vying for control. I found no great cause, no great plot, no great character development, no great style. It was a very disappointing read for me. I cannot recommend the book.

The Bostonians (1885-86) falls more or less in the middle of Henry James’s career as a novelist, ten years after his breezy debut, Roderick Hudson and sixteen years before The Wings of a Dove. Its nearest chronology-mate is The Princess Casamassima, with which it shares its unusual (for James) political theme. The Princess Casamassima is set in revolutionary socialist circles in London; The Bostonians, in radical feminist circles in Boston and New York.

Both of these ‘political’ novels are striking for their lack of knowledge and interest in the actual ideas the political groups represented might hold. The socialists of The Princess Casamassima discuss political theory less, and in less detail, than any group of radicals known within the history of man, while the feminists of The Bostonians seem to limit their analysis to long evenings of weepily considering how very, very horrid men have been to women throughout history. For a novel of this period that actually engages with the ideas and ideals of the nineteenth-century feminist movement, I would decidedly recommend Gissing’s 1893, London-set The Odd Women over The Bostonians. Gissing is fascinated by ideas, and he handles them well within fiction. James isn’t that kind of novelist at all.

Where James excels is in the nebulous world of feelings and impulses and sensations, and he has plenty to work on, very absorbingly, in this novel. The settings are very fine: radical, shabby-chic Boston (I’m thinking of the splendid early soirée at Miss Birdseye’s in particular); glossy, voracious New York (the half-way-through soirée at Mrs Burrage’s); and the austere, gently declining Cape Cod resort town Marmion, evoked in a painterly manner, through its evanescent light effects and barely-there seascapes.

I enjoyed the characters of the novel, as well, who are sharply and often satirically drawn. The nervous, highly-strung, fastidious, emotionally needy Boston feminist Olive Chancellor came alive for me, probably more than the other two figures in the central triangle of the novel: down-at-heel Mississippian would-be lawyer and would-be conservative essayist Basil Ransom, and young, beautiful, eloquent Verena Tarrant, conscripted first by her father and then by Olive as an inspirational feminist speaker, and romantically pursued by Ransom for motives in which the erotic and the ideological combine. The more minor Bostonian figures are a lot of fun: the vague, kind, shambling octogenarian reformer Miss Birdseye (whom initial American readers were outraged to suspect was a portrait of a real figure, Elizabeth Peabody); and the scene-stealing, no-nonsense Dr Mary Prance.

Above all, perhaps, what fascinated me in this novel was its use of the post Civil War context to lend poignancy and depth to its political theme and its emotional narrative. The novel begins in the shadow of the war, when Olive welcomes Basil—a distant cousin—into her Bostonian home, having invited him for a visit in a spirit of reconciliation (which rapidly dissolves as soon as she gets to know him). Both have suffered in the conflict, Olive having lost two brothers, while Basil has lost his family wealth and his prospects. The recentness of the war and the rawness of its memories are buried for much of the novel subsequently, but we never quite allowed to forget them. A pivotal scene—for me, one of the finest, and most complex and charged episodes in the novel—is that where Verena takes Basil to visit the newly built Memorial Hall at Harvard, commemorating the university’s war dead of the Union, but not the Confederacy, side.

This novel about a southern conservative and Civil War veteran who competes with his lesbian cousin in Boston for the love of a feminist activist works surprisingly well given the basic dramatic conflict which was highly scandalous for its time and flies in the face of today's political correctness. After much psychological conflict involving the three main characters, the sweet Northern girl abandons feminism to elope with the gallant southern gentleman.

The reason why the Bostonians works is because of Henry James ability to write from experience. Whether dealing with Europeans or Americans, he wrote only about people and situations he was thoroughly familiar with. Consequently, his characters are always very complex and complete. They always act in a manner that is congruent with their psychological makeup and social background.

Much as I admire the skill and workmanship of James, I am unable to truly enjoy his works. I find him prissy and am seldom able to identity with any of his protagonists. However, I must acknowledge that James made a great contribution to American literature by setting a high standard for plot structure and psychological subtlety for those who followed him.

even the lesbian overtones couldnt save this book

Ugh, this was really unpleasant, and actually upsets me—I really like some of Henry James’s other books (especially Wings of a Dove, though I also loved Portrait of a Lady), but this one left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Someone wrote, of the characters in this book, that “He [Henry James] does not love them. Why should he ask more of us?” And it’s the best summary of the book I can cite.

Basil is awful. Just AWFUL. Verena is . . . fine, I guess, but ends up being rather pathetic. Olive isn’t really much of anything, but it’s clear that James hates her the most of the three. To be fair, he makes subtle, sly digs at all three of his main characters throughout the novel (and not in a funny or interesting way), but Olive definitely suffers the worst of it.

The plot also sucks. It kind of reminds me of an Austen novel (fair warning, I hate Austen). Girl is spitfire, self-assured, interesting, independent, likes to challenge men as equals; she is very different from what people expect her to be (submissive, simple, dependent). Girl falls in love, ends up marrying man and submitting herself to him as she was expected—you see, she just needed to meet the right man to whom she can submit herself. Depression ever after.

James just sounds like a whiny Trump-et who hates anything that smacks of progress. For the most part, I think James identified with Basil, who gets treated the best.

And that’s really rotten because Basil is the worst. This is an example of his thought process (which, while funny, is also really annoying): “Twenty other persons had arrived, and had placed themselves in the chairs along the wall. Basil Ransom wondered who they all were. He had a general idea they were mediums, Communists, vegetarians.”

He hates women, especially women who think they have the right to speak. He hates independence in women and really only values physical beauty. He's really, really repetitive about these things.

my first James in full and i'm in awe at how this book so eschews setting that the material of women's faces and the emotions twitching across them makes up the tangible reality of the novel.... surely more tears to come, feminism isn't the moral debate you think but rather the surface of cosmic tensions where upon the sexes collide and untangle, denying and affirming each other in an endless death loop...

also loved reading a beat up physical copy of this (one of a total of three total books in english at a used store in nagoya) which i misplaced three times and had to recover from a subway station.

I read this book because I just moved to Boston and hoped it would give me a sense of atmosphere, which it did. I was not expecting it to be as hilarious as it was. Unfortunately the humor tones down a little bit after the first hundred pages. It starts out absolutely ruthless but then you get the sense he maybe relented a little, because after all he loves these Bostonians, doesn't he? And so do we. (Or if you don't, you might be heartless.) Anyway, as the humor starts to fade the book becomes completely gripping in a dramatic way, so it is a win-win. Have you ever had friends or maybe even people you don't like very much who, for some reason, enter your consciousness such that even their smallest gestures or off-handed comments seem extremely significant, even urgent, fraught with a kind of meaning that points way beyond themselves? That's how these characters are, I think. (Maybe all Henry James?) And I guess I could see how it could get tiresome for some people, but I disagree with them. So, anyway, I read this book on the edge of my seat and was blown away at the end.

“She had brought him into her life, and she should have to pay for it.”

Although it’s well-written and the characters are well-drawn, the story is simply not enjoyable nor worth the reading time. It starts in an interesting enough way—a young female abolitionist and feminist who lost two brothers in the Civil War on the Union side connects with her cousin from Mississippi who fought for the Confederacy. She’s “a woman without laughter” who has long “hated men, as a class” and who was “born to lead a crusade [against] the unhappiness of women.” He is her ideological opposite. I wished the novel focused on their relationship—maybe on her (Olive) winning him (Basil) over politically and him softening her socially. But it doesn’t, instead it diverges into an interpersonal tug-of-war over a third-party, a feminist speaker (Verena), who is used by the author to illustrate the flaws of the ideological perspectives in play, which is far less interesting or entertaining.