Book Reviews - Review 309

It's a long time since I read this, and I'm not sure how I'd rate it if I read it today. It's a book I found more impressive than compelling - but certainly, unlike The Portrait of a Lady, it has a lot to say, and for the most part it says it well.

The Bostonians portrays the relationship between two New England women, the buttoned-up feminist intellectual Olive Chancellor and the beautiful young Verena Tarrant. Olive discovers in Verena a powerful oratorical style that she believes she can co-opt into her cause, though Verena is initially indifferent about that cause. The relationship between the two women is quite subtly portrayed: Olive is both enthralled by, and jealous of, her friend's feminine charisma, and there is the clear implication of a lesbian attraction to her. Olive is pained by the wooing of Verena by Basil Ransom, a suave lawyer from the southern States, to the extent that one starts wonder whether Olive has embraced "progress" as a refuge from her unhappy emotional life, as a sublimation of her sense that she does not fit into the traditional gender role of a woman - but for deeper reasons than she acknowledges.

These are intriguing questions, and given how circumspect he had to be at the time he was writing, James approaches them with both subtlety and clarity. Unlike in some of his later novels, the action is governed by psychology rather than ideas - Olive in particular is an interesting and complex creation. Also, The Bostonians is not vitiated like the later novels by James' fascination with style for style's sake; it is surprisingly readable.

This is a better novel than some of James' more famous works, neglected perhaps for its controversial themes on the one hand (politics, feminism and implicit homosexuality), and for its narrative straightforwardness on the other.