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    A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"
    A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"
    A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"
    Ebook58 pages44 minutes

    A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535835480
    A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"

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      A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians" - Gale

      11

      The Bostonians

      Henry James

      1886

      Introduction

      In his 1886 novel The Bostonians, the American novelist Henry James offers a nuanced, incisive portrayal of the women's rights movement as it churned and gathered steam in the 1870s. Following the turmoil of the Civil War, many Boston area intellectuals and reformers turned from the accomplished cause of abolitionism to the new quest for suffrage and other rights for women. James recognized this movement's relevance in a journal entry of April 8, 1883, as cited in Leon Edel's biography Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895:

      I wished to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf.

      For his novel, James devised a provocative premise: an attractive young woman with an entrancing improvisational style of oration is discovered one evening both by a wealthy feminist aiming to propel the movement into a blazing new era and by a chivalrous, conservative Southerner who, utterly charmed, soon realizes that he is falling in love with her—and wants nothing more than to thwart her potential blossoming as a brilliant prophetess of the women's cause. The attractions, repulsions, and agitations among these three archetypal characters lend palpable tension to a tale filled with psychological and social insight into one of the most significant eras in history, when the women of the world's preeminent democracy first articulated the collective demand that the two sexes be treated equally, both in law and in life.

      Author Biography

      Henry James, Jr., was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, the second of five children to Henry James, Sr., and Mary Walsh James. The elder Henry James adopted progressive viewpoints, such as the spiritual brand of utopian socialism expounded by the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and promoted them in books that never proved popular. He was nonetheless profoundly influential in the lives of his children, impressing upon them his acute moral consciousness and intellectual devotion. The oldest child, William, would become a renowned psychologist and philosopher; in William's shadow, the young Henry duly attuned himself to a mode of constant analysis and introspection, absorbing education under various circumstances as, after an early childhood in New York, his family moved around Europe between 1855 and 1860. Shy and taciturn, James had few childhood friends and, in his solitude, turned to books and the workings of his imagination, penning stories and dramas from an early age.

      Returning to New England, James suffered at age eighteen an obscure trauma while helping put out a fire, a strain of sorts that he rarely and only vaguely referred to. He would suffer back pains at points in his life but otherwise remained active, and yet he evidently perceived the accident as justifying or legitimizing his isolation and estrangement from society. In light of the absence of evidence that James ever engaged in a romantic relationship (though he would have great love for his cousin Minny Temple, who was afflicted with consumption and died in 1870), some biographers have concluded that the accident affected his ability to perform sexually. Regardless of the actuality, the timing of the incident was itself significant: the Civil War was just getting under way, and while his younger brothers enthusiastically enlisted to fight for the Union, James lingered at home. Meanwhile, buoyed by the family's ample wealth, he strove to establish a literary career, publishing critical reviews and short stories beginning in 1864.

      In time, James's restless mind and heart drifted away from his homeland.

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